Summary

The precarious financial health of the airline industry portends continuing flux in both U.S. airline fleets' mix of planes and in their strategies for operating aging aircraft. Many airlines today are constantly revising their estimated capacity needs, including plans to keep aging aircraft in the skies. GAO believes that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) needs a clear picture of airlines' compliance with rules for aging aircraft. Because of the potential gravity of even one major incident involving an aging aircraft, FAA needs to know the compliance status of each of the 1,800 planes in the nation's aging fleet. Although FAA has taken positive steps to monitor airline compliance, it has neither developed databases on aircraft compliance or the activities of its inspectors nor completed planned inspections of aging aircraft. Better information on airlines' compliance would allow FAA to identify the areas of highest risk, which require more of its attention. Because FAA's large workload disperses inspection resources over many high-priority areas, GAO believes that it is essential that FAA have access to complete and accurate data with which to target resources.

GAO found that: (1) airlines have frequently revised their estimated capacity needs and lacked definitive plans on how long to keep aging aircraft or how to comply with new FAA aging aircraft rules because of changing air travel demands and uncertain corporate financial structures; (2) in response to changing demands and financial constraints, airlines have delayed or cancelled new aircraft orders, changed fleet composition strategies, and utilized previously retired or aging aircraft; (3) FAA failure to create a centralized aircraft database has limited its ability to monitor operator compliance with the new FAA rules and airworthiness directives (AD), collect and summarize aircraft data, and identify aircraft which are approaching compliance thresholds; (4) establishing a comprehensive centralized database could increase FAA inspectors' ability to monitor airlines which might be slow in complying, request plans for compliance, and identify operator implementation obstacles such as parts and labor shortages; (5) FAA inspection activities for aging aircraft included AD verification inspections, the National Aviation Safety Inspection Program (NASIP), and hands-on structural spot inspections; (6) the effectiveness of FAA inspection initiatives is questionable due to inspectors' failure to consistently enter AD data into the automated inspector tracking system, hands-on inspection scheduling problems, and insufficient spot inspection data and guidelines; and (7) FAA cannot effectively determine whether inspectors are emphasizing aging aircraft-related inspections as directed and targeting resources to high priority areas without complete data.