Aviation Safety Action Program

Aviation safety culture, military and civilian, is built on the principle that protected reporting produces better information than adversarial reporting.

The Federal Aviation Administration's Aviation Safety Action Program works the same way for civilian operators.

You can report a close call, an incident, a deviation, and the information goes into the safety database to help identify systemic risks, without that report automatically triggering enforcement against the person who filed it.

The program works because people trust it enough to use it honestly.

Aviation has spent decades building a safety culture that treats honest reporting of errors as the foundation of systemic improvement.

The Aviation Safety Action Program and the Aviation Safety Hotline exist because the industry recognized that a pilot who hit an error was more dangerous than one who reported it.

The same logic applies at the individual level.

If you crossed a runway, you shouldn't have crossed.

These reports go into a database used by researchers and the FAA to identify systemic safety trends, and they have contributed to meaningful regulatory improvements for decades.

For operators who want a more structured approach, the Aviation Safety Action Program, or ASAP, is a voluntary agreement between an air carrier and the FAA that creates a safety event reporting system with enhanced protections for employees who use it.

When ASAP programs function correctly, they surface problems before those problems become accidents.

When management uses ASAP data to identify and discipline individual reporters rather than fix systemic issues, the program breaks down and becomes a trap instead of a tool.

By the time a serious event occurs, the organization has been operating in degraded mode for so long that nobody inside it recognizes how far they've drifted.

The Aviation Safety Action Program, or ASAP, exists precisely to break that cycle.

ASAPE is a voluntary reporting partnership between carriers, the FAA, and employee groups.

typically unions, where a pilot or crew member can report a safety issue or their own deviation without facing punitive action.

The key detail here is that the pilots self-reported the mistake, which apparently grants them total immunity.

The NTSB has concealed the pirate's identity... pilots' identities, and, uh, the airline hasn't punished them solely because they self-reported under the Aviation Safety Action Program, or ASAP, which is something the FAA apparently endorses.

Now, first of all, whether they self-reported this or not, the passengers were going to report it themselves, so they don't really deserve any credit.

Plunging 7,000 feet per minute is something you would probably notice if you're a passenger.

Before his 37 years at American, he flew F-14s as a Navy fighter pilot.

He volunteered with what's called the Aviation Safety Action Program and which takes a just culture approach to the mistakes pilot make in line operations.

Mani's also spent 17 years bringing lean and crew resource management into patient safety work, with more than 100 hospitals, including Vanderbilt, Ohio State, and UCLA, and plus hospitals in Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico.

He is a distinguished graduate of the Naval Academy and holds a master's in human factors and system safety from Lund University in Sweden.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, you know, the name of that program, the acronym Aviation Safety Action Program, it's, you know, the focus is on it sounds like the boundaries would be anything safety related, not mistake related or, you know, individual flaws or, you know, because, you know, people do put a lot of.

Shame on themselves when they make a mistake, even if they're not being punished externally.