Summary

This document presents the results of GAO's survey of FAA safety inspectors. The purpose of the survey was to gather information about the technical training available to them. We developed a Web-based questionnaire to obtain this information. We drew a stratified random probability sample of 496 inspectors from the population of 2,989 aviation safety inspectors. We received 392 responses, a 79-percent response rate. All estimates have been weighted to the population of aviation safety inspectors. The percentage estimates for all survey respondents have a margin of error of plus or minus 4.6 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level. Where the confidence intervals exceeded plus or minus 4.6 percentage points, we provide confidence intervals rather than point estimates. For questions in which we requested a count of courses, we provide confidence intervals for the estimated averages at the 95 percent confidence level. A more detailed discussion of our scope and methodology and a discussion of the summary of selected survey results are contained in our report entitled "Aviation Safety: FAA Management Practices for Technical Training Mostly Effective; Further Actions Could Enhance Results." GAO-05-728. We conducted our survey work from December 2004 through February 2005 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.