Uncrewed aviation operational safety continues to be an issue for a safe integration of drones and air taxis to the National Airspace System (NAS) given that these novel remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs) are joining an extremely safe existing infrastructure.

In 1903, when the Wright brothers had their first successful flight of a heavier-than-air machine, the aviation industry was born but there were no other objects in the sky except birds and the occasional hot air balloon. This is not the case with uncrewed aviation, as we have become a growing industry at a time when we have over 45,000 crewed flights every day inside the US, including private, cargo and commercial airliners.

So, how did a system that manages that amount of traffic become so safe and so reliable? One definite answer is that over 120 years the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have analyzed and examined every accident and incident involving aircraft and have refined and tweaked to almost perfection the Air Traffic Control (ATC) system that we know today. The four pillars of modern aviation—pilot training, aircraft design/manufacturing, weather monitoring/forecast, and ATC procedures—have been fined tuned to a point where aviation accidents are rare, even though they have not been eliminated completely.

The other components of this operational safety excellence are the less-known, non-punitive aviation voluntary reporting programs implemented and managed by the FAA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). These online, confidential reporting systems are a key component of a larger operational safety infrastructure designed and implemented to provide an enormous database of big and small occurrences that can contribute to the constant improvement of the system.

The most important and most often used programs are:

  • ASAP (Aviation Safety Action Program). This system encourages voluntary reporting of safety issues and events that come to the attention of employees of certain certificate holders, mostly Part 121 commercial airline pilots.
  • ATSAP (Air Traffic Safety Action Program). This is an agreement between the FAA, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), and the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE) that fosters a voluntary, cooperative, non-punitive environment for FAA air traffic employees to openly report safety concerns. 
  • ATSAP-X. This program is intended to encourage controllers and their managers to voluntarily provide safety-related information through an automated platform, so the FAA can learn about and mitigate aviation safety hazards.
  • SAFER-FCT (Federal Contracts Towers). This is an agreement between the FAA, NATCA, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Inc. (PATCO Inc.), and the federal contract tower companies that fosters a voluntary, cooperative, and non-punitive environment for FAA Contract Air Traffic Controllers to openly report safety events and concerns.
  • FOQA (Flight Operational Quality Assurance). This system collects and analyzes digital flight data generated during normal operations. These programs provide greater insight into the total flight operations environment. FOQA data is unique because it can provide objective information that is not available through other methods. The information and insights provided by FOQA can improve safety by significantly enhancing training effectiveness, operational procedures, maintenance and engineering procedures, and air traffic control procedures. Forty-six US operators currently have FAA-approved FOQA programs. 
  • ASRS (Aviation Safety Reporting System). This program was established in 1976 as a partnership between NASA and the FAA. ASRS is confidential, non-punitive, and available to all participants in the NAS who wish to voluntarily report safety incidents and situations. This is the system mostly used by Part 91 private pilots and other non-Part 121 operators.
  • VDRP (Voluntary Disclosing Reporting Program). This system provides incentives for an air carrier, repair station, qualified fractional ownership program, or other eligible FAA-regulated entity to voluntarily identify, report, and correct instances of regulatory noncompliance. The program allows the FAA to oversee and participate in the root-cause analysis of the events leading to the violations. 

All this data is loaded into ASIAS (Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing System), which enables users to perform integrated queries across multiple databases, search an extensive warehouse of safety data, and display pertinent elements in an array of useful formats.

With all these separate systems and the huge amount of safety data that is reported constantly, who is in charge of making sense of it all and turning it into actionable items that actually improve aviation safety?

The answer is not intuitive and involves not only the FAA and NASA but also a company known as MITRE, created in 1958 as a private, not-for-profit organization to provide engineering and technical guidance for the United States Air Force. This work served as the foundation for the creation of the first federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) managed by MITRE, sponsored by the Department of Defense.

MITRE organizes a meeting, held twice a year, that involves the FAA, NASA, and a few others to discuss and analyze the data and turn it into concrete actions that continually improve aviation safety. The Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) is in charge of formally make these recommendations.

On all these above-mentioned organizations’ websites, there is a strong emphasis on uncrewed aviation, and almost all of them mention non-piloted aircraft as part of their mandate, so we have to assume that some reports of incidents and accidents involving drones are being fed into the system.

The uncrewed aviation family is pursuing a similar approach to safety recommendations through the creation in 2020 of the Drone Safety Team (DST), an industry-government partnership with a mandate to ensure the safe operations of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in the NAS. The DST strives to enable the safe integration of UAS by defining consensus-based safety enhancements based on a data-driven process and collaboration amongst members of the UAS industry.

I’m aware that there are a lot of acronyms, and it all sounds a bit convoluted, and I agree with this characterization to a certain extent. But let us face it: We have a very safe NAS, and adding thousands of drones and air taxis while maintaining the current ATC infrastructure will require a lot of technology and the cooperation of every single stakeholder.

So, let us embrace these non-punitive, voluntary reporting systems, and let us add our grain of salt to the operational safety of our skies.