NASA Forms

NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System offers a wealth of resources on real-world operations. And more.

Jim Wolper

Sunday, October 20, 2024 at 06:26 AM ET

Verified

Edited By: Omar Filipovic

Key Takeaways:

The NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) allows pilots to report inadvertent FAR violations within 10 days to avoid civil penalties, serving as a critical mechanism for documenting aviation safety issues.
ASRS reports, compiled from various aviation personnel, highlight recurring safety trends such as UAV incursions, procedural errors (e.g., low-altitude alerts), maintenance discrepancies, issues with ATC instructions, dangerous goods handling, and GPS interference.
Pilots are strongly encouraged to utilize the ASRS to report incidents, as the anonymized data is crucial for identifying systemic problems and improving overall safety across the national airspace system.

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It was a fun hangar-flying session, right up until one of the local instructors got serious for a moment. He warned us that the tower at a local Class D airport was “issuing a pilot deviation a week, so have your NASA forms ready.” The alleged violations were mostly for airspace incursions.

I rolled my eyes a little: I had once narrowly missed an airspace incursion there when I got no answer from my radio calls. I did a 360-degree turn to avoid entering the Class D and tried the ground frequency. “Sorry, I had the volume turned down,” was the controller’s response.