WASHINGTON — The Government Accountability Office is recommending that the Federal Aviation Administration improve its process for investigating launch mishaps, one which currently relies heavily on launch providers.
In a Dec. 7 report, the GAO beneficial that the FAA’s Office of Industrial Space Transportation “comprehensively evaluate” its processes for investigating launch mishaps, including developing criteria for when those investigations ought to be led by the launch operator.
The report, which examined industrial launch mishaps from 2000 to January 2023, noted that the FAA was the lead agency for investigating all but one in all the 50 mishaps during that period. The exception was the October 2014 SpaceShipTwo fatal accident, where the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) led the investigation.
The FAA says it decides on a case-by-case basis whether to conduct the mishap investigation itself or allow the launch operator to handle it with FAA oversight. In practice, all 49 investigations were operator-led.
“FAA relies on the operator-led approach, agency officials told us, because, given highly specialized vehicle designs amongst firms, the agency doesn’t have adequate resources for in-house investigations,” the GAO report stated. Those officials estimated that an agency-led investigation might take 10 to twenty times longer since the FAA lacks the “intimate knowledge of car design” needed to effectively investigate mishaps.
Each FAA and industry support operator-led reviews, that are guided by the FAA to various degrees based on the character of every mishap and the experience level of the launch operator. Nonetheless, the GAO report stated that several unidentified industry stakeholders questioned the independence of company-led investigations in addition to their ability to discover broader organization issues versus technical causes of mishaps.
The GAO found that while the FAA says it decides individually who will lead a mishap investigation, it “has no specific criteria amongst its procedures for making those case-by-case determinations.” That is meant, the FAA argues, to offer it flexibility, however the GAO noted that the FAA thus “cannot ensure consistency in its decisions.”
The FAA also has not evaluated the effectiveness of operator-led investigations. “A changing operating environment also underscore FAA’s have to be certain that its mishap investigation process is effective,” the GAO stated, citing the growing number of economic launches. Without such an evaluation, “FAA can’t be assured that its safety oversight is best achieving agency objectives in an area of critical importance.”
Along with mishap investigations, the GAO report addressed the power to share lessons learned about mishaps amongst agencies and corporations. There aren’t any formal mechanism for doing so, the GAO found, but there are informal channels of communication. The FAA can also be making one other attempt at establishing a lessons-learned database for industrial space transportation after a previous effort at a voluntary system, greater than a decade ago, failed due to a scarcity of industry participation.
In a response to the GAO, Philip McNamara, assistant secretary for administration on the Department of Transportation, which incorporates the FAA, said the agency accepted the recommendations and would offer an in depth response inside 180 days.
The GAO report was requested by the leadership of the House Transportation Committee and its aviation subcommittee. Notably, House oversight of the FAA’s industrial space transportation office has typically been within the jurisdiction of the House Science Committee, not the House Transportation Committee.