ASRS: The Case for Confidential Incident Reporting Systems

anniversary of operation. Just prior to this event, the ASRS reach another milestone – the processing of its 500,000th incident report. Scarcely one year later, report intake has now exceeded 558,000. The longevity and success of this government program is a remarkable example of how interagency cooperation can create a stable, effective agent for system safety improvements against the backdrop of changing political climates and times. The ASRS was founded in 1976 through a Memorandum of Agreement between the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The program was designed primarily to support the FAA in its mission to eliminate unsafe conditions in the national aviation system, and prevent avoidable accidents. The first step was to design a system in which the aviation community, both individually, and collectively, could place a high degree of trust. The FAA quickly recognized that its regulatory and enforcement roles would discourage the aviation community from trusting and using the new program if the FAA were to operate the system. It therefore asked NASA to act as the highly respected, independent third party tha