The Federal Aviation Administration should update its methods for ensuring commercial aviation safety so that the agency can better evaluate and regulate new and innovative concepts for aviation operations and technologies, says a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Building on an initial assessment published in 2022, the report explores how the FAA can improve its practices related to safety risk management and safety assurance, foster a stronger safety culture throughout commercial aviation, and better position itself to oversee and regulate a changing industry.

The FAA has a vital safety assurance role for commercial aviation. The agency runs a vast and complex air traffic management system, establishes rules and procedures for aircraft flying in the national airspace system, and certifies aircraft and component designs, manufacturers, maintenance personnel, and operators. However, the safety management system currently in place is not suited to transformative changes, the report says.

Many coming transformations in the industry are sufficiently novel that their impact on safety and risk cannot be extrapolated from current data and analysis methods. For example, certifying safety systems for an aircraft with some autonomous functions and a pilot on the ground must be radically different than for an aircraft with two pilots in the cockpit, as is the current commercial standard. Other potentially transformative changes ahead include:

  • Novel ways of storing energy and generating aircraft power and propulsion
  • New aircraft configurations, including for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL)
  • Data mining and machine learning.

The FAA should work to create paths that enable the management of new technologies and operations that do not fit the assumptions of the current system, the report says.

“Safety management is a never-ending job ― after the most rigorous processes, concerns can still arise years or even decades later ― so the ways we ensure safety have to evolve as well,” said Amy Pritchett, professor and head of the department of aerospace engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, and chair of the committee that wrote the report. “Things like autonomous flight present serious challenges for the FAA, but change also brings opportunities to chart a forward-thinking new plan that reconsiders the most appropriate ways to support safety processes, both internally and externally.”

Recent events in the aviation industry also demonstrate the need for safety to be managed across distributed organizations and increasingly complex technologies, according to the report. Even established companies and technologies can be vulnerable to lapses in safety management. Transformative changes in aviation introduced by different types of aircraft, technology, and operations will pose further complexities, especially when they are proposed and introduced by new entrants to the industry.

Along with acquiring adequate funding for expert technical staffing, FAA should adopt a new, broader vision for safety management processes, the report says. In evaluating personnel requirements, the FAA’s Office of Aviation Safety should consider what expertise is needed to analyze and address current and likely future technologies and operations, to support the spread and maturation of safety culture within industry organizations, and to monitor for safety once new systems and operations are implemented.

The design, production, and operation of aircraft can be a highly distributed process involving a prime organization and a supply chain of third-party component and service providers. The FAA cannot have confidence that all safety risks are being identified, understood, monitored for, and addressed by only examining the culture and practices of the prime organization, or by examining each organization in the chain separately. Effective oversight requires verification that safety management is occurring in a deliberate, well-coordinated and well-integrated manner across the many organizations involved, in a continuously applied and monitored layered safety management system, the report says. The FAA should establish the personnel, mechanisms, and policies to enable this oversight perspective.

Radical transformations to general operating and flight rules will come with new aircraft serving new purposes. Currently, however, there are no systemic, rigorous, broadly documented methods for identifying, categorizing, and analyzing the risks that may emerge. The report says that Congress should charter research into the establishment of systematic and repeatable methods for analyzing and designing civil aviation general operating and flight rules that enable novel technologies and services to share the airspace with current-day activities.

Many new technologies can monitor, measure, and record more conditions, and in more detail. Additionally, changing roles between humans and machines ― particularly with increasingly automated functions and remotely piloted aircraft ― may impact operators’ ability to observe and report safety concerns. The Office of Aviation Safety should assess what data streams would be most appropriate to collect and analyze, and proactively determine how new methods for data analysis and data mining can improve on-going safety assurance.

The report contains a range of other detailed recommendations for Congress and the FAA.

The study — undertaken by the Committee on Emerging Trends in Aviation Safety — was sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, engineering, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.