NASA Forms

This article first appeared in the Aviation Safety Magazine.

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.

I should have filed a NASA form.

The so-called NASA form is an integral part of NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System. The purpose of the system is to encourage people in aviation to report safety issues to a central, easily accessible, anonymized database. Some issues might involve a violation of the FARs, and that’s where the encouragement comes into play, as outlined in Advisory Circular 00-46F (or its most recent replacement): “Although a finding of violation may be made, neither a civil penalty nor certificate suspension will be imposed” if the problem was inadvertent, not criminal, and reported within 10 days.

The ASRS (asrs.arc.nasa.gov) works to identify trends and uncover safety-related problems throughout the national airspace system. But all its data are available to anyone with an internet connection, including a searchable database of reports, which makes for fascinating reading. A lot of reports come from air carrier pilots, which makes sense because they fly the most, but there are plenty of GA airplanes in the mix as well. Plus controllers and mechanics.

In a recent six-month period there were over 500 reports. Some interesting safety trends were highlighted. From my own, non-scientific perusal of recent reports, a few things stuck out.

Unmanned aerial vehicles—UAVs, or drones—are more and more common in the national airspace system, the NAS. Drones are definitely making their presence known. Pilots of aircraft and drone operators themselves file reports. Many of these are about inadvertent airspace incursions. The ones from pilots of aircraft are scarier, because they happen in the air.

A surprising number of reports involve low-altitude alerts from ATC or from a ground proximity warning system. Take low-altitude alerts seriously.

One pilot got such warning after ATC vectored the airplane onto a charted segment 700 feet below the charted altitude for that segment. Although the reports are anonymous, they can include the airport where the incident happened. One can pull up the chart and follow along to see that the airplane was below the charted altitude. It is more difficult to find the minimum vectoring altitude data, so it may well have been that ATC was acting within its parameters, although in my opinion that seems unlikely.

There were chart-reading errors in other reports. Going over these and studying the charts in question can be a good way to keep sharp.

Several reports involved maintenance problems. One pilot had a trim runaway on the first flight after maintenance and had to use a lot of muscle power to keep the airplane under control. The pilot had not read the maintenance status sheet, assuming that only some engine maintenance had been done, and was doing the due diligence for a first flight after engine replacement.

The pilot didn’t know, but should have, that one of the trim servos had been replaced. That takes an extra level of care. The trim servo was not installed correctly. Another factor was the pilot’s complacency because nobody else had flown the airplane, so it was easy to assume that the status was known.

In another incident, an air carrier pilot noticed an unusual reading on the cockpit oxygen gauge during preflight (this sounds vague, which is one of the negative aspects of the making the data base anonymous). Backup oxygen systems are rarely used but when you need them you really need them, so they are critical to safe flight. It turned out that a new oxygen bottle had been installed incorrectly. The scary part is that the maintenance had been done quite a while ago and nobody had noticed. The three most important things in flying pressurized airplanes are emergency O2, emergency O2 and emergency O2.

What happens when a controller asks for maximum forward speed? I can’t find this in the Pilot-Controller Glossary, by the way, but it is pretty self-explanatory. One pilot of a turbine airplane tried to comply with this and exceeded the airframe’s maximum speed, which requires at the minimum a maintenance inspection.

The pilot wrote that there was a rough air and a possible wake turbulence encounter. I would prefer to be 5 or 10 knots slower than the barber pole (maximum indicated airspeed in a turbine airplane) or red line. I think the lesson here is the reminder that while pilots are required to comply with ATC instructions, compliance cannot mean violating aircraft limitations. When in doubt, tell ATC what you can do—“I can do 230,” or, “at least 140 until short final”—so they can adjust.

A very large proportion of the reports I found involved paperwork, which doesn’t sound like much of a safety issue, except a lot of it had to do with dangerous goods (DGs) or hazardous materials. Pilots flying under FAR 121 or 135 get a lot of training on the handling of DGs, but when flying under FAR 91, you have to train yourself. Think about some of the stuff that you load on board, especially if your work uses DGs.

Small quantities—say, a heart patient with a small bottle of nitroglycerin tablets—don’t require special handling, but I once had a passenger arrive bragging about the fabulous bargain one of the stores in town had on paint supplies. There were five gallons of paints and thinners and other stuff with hard-to-pronounce names. The passenger was not happy that I spent 30 minutes tracking down the paperwork, packaging and labeling requirements, but I’m sure would have been less happy if I hadn’t determined a safe way to handle the stuff and we’d ended up on the evening news.

One of the scariest reports was from an ATC facility that was overwhelmed by high traffic volume, weather deviations, nearby special-use airspace and the added problem of GPS interference testing. The controller-in-charge decided that the GPS jamming was an unacceptable addition to the workload and requested that the jamming be stopped.

There is some confusion about how to do this. Former editions of the Aeronautical Information Manual included the phrase “hit the buzzer,” which Medevac pilots could use to ask ATC to ask the jamming agency to stop, mostly to allow instrument approaches. In this report, one controller referred to “stop buzzard,” while another referred to “stop buzzer.” Turns out “stop buzzer” has been changed to “stop stream,” according to the Pilot/Controller Glossary, and is requested by ATC of an airborne aircraft, not the other way around. If you need another agency to stop jamming or spoofing GPS, there’s no magic words to use with ATC, except maybe to say, “Please have them stop the jamming.”

I should have reported my Class D problem with using KXXX tower, as the database would anonymize it. There was clearly a safety issue, because a tower controller has enough to worry about without an unknown aircraft in the mix. Uncovering this kind of problem is the real purpose of the ASRS, and you won’t know about it you don’t look for it.