§44723 Annual Report

Summary

By January 1 each year, the Secretary of Transportation must send Congress a full report about the Federal Aviation Administration’s safety enforcement work for the fiscal year that ended the previous September 30. The report must cover 11 main areas: how end-of-year staffing for operations, maintenance, and avionics inspectors compares to staffing goals and how staff were split between air carrier and general aviation; the range of inspector experience and how many are fully qualified; who got required training by course and who finished all required training; how yearly work programs are set, how that changed from the year before, and how the programs make sure rules and safe practices are followed; a comparison of actual inspections to the plan by field office and an explanation for any office that did less than 80 percent of its planned inspections; whether internal management controls are adequate to make field managers follow FAA policies (like inspection priorities, office coordination, minimum standards, and followup); progress on updating guidance and regulations and a list of proposed regulatory changes still pending; the specific measures used to judge program progress, quality, and new safety problems; statistics on civil penalty cases closed in the prior 2 fiscal years (total initial and final penalties, total dollars collected, range collected, average and range of processing time); statistics on other enforcement actions in the prior 2 fiscal years (total violations cited and how many cases ended in suspensions, revocations, warnings, or no action); and schedules showing the industry safety record for air carriers and general aviation, with counts of inspections that found problems versus those that did not, how often each air carrier had safety problems, and an analysis of overall compliance with aviation rules.