§44723 Annual Report

Summary

By January 1 each year, the Secretary of Transportation must send Congress a detailed report about FAA safety enforcement for the fiscal year that ended the previous September 30. The report must cover 11 kinds of information: a comparison of end‑of‑year staffing in operations, maintenance, and avionics to staffing goals and how inspectors were assigned between air carriers and general aviation; the range of inspector experience and how many are fully qualified; mandatory training given by course and how many inspectors finished all required training; how annual work programs are set, how that changed from the prior year, and how the programs ensure safety; a comparison of actual inspections to planned inspections by field office and an explanation for any office that completed less than 80 percent of its plan; whether internal management controls are adequate to make sure field managers follow FAA policies (such as inspector priorities and inspection followup); efforts to update guidance and regulations for new technology and industry changes and a backlog of proposed rule changes; the specific measures used to judge progress, quality, and new safety problems; a schedule of civil penalty cases closed in the two prior fiscal years with totals for initial and final penalties, amounts collected, ranges, and average and range of processing time; a schedule of other enforcement actions in the two prior fiscal years with counts of violations and outcomes (suspensions, revocations, warnings, or no action); and schedules showing the year’s safety record for air carriers and general aviation, comparing inspections that found deficiencies to those that did not, the frequency of deficiencies by carrier, and an overall data-based analysis of compliance.