s, such as clear lines of responsibility and written documentation. It fosters more consistent, structured inspections by standardizing inspection tasks, linking inspectors’ training more closely to their assigned responsibilities, and using teams rather than individual inspectors to perform many inspections. The program also calls for a number of enhancements to improve the usefulness of inspection database for reporting inspection results and the addition of data quality assurance managers and analysts. The goal of this redesign is to target inspection resources to those areas that present the greates safety risks.-FAA emphasizes a system safety approach in ATOS that replaces routine surveillance and goes beyond spot-checking airlines for compliance with aviation regulations. System safety involves the application of technical and managerial skill to identify, analyze, assess, and control hazards and risks. It covers every aspect of and airline’s operations, from the design of the hardware to the culture and attitudes to the airline’s personnel.-Under ATOS, FAA assigns a team of inspectors to oversee each airline. Three principal inspectors lead the team, one for each major area of inspections (operations, maintenance, and avionics). Additional team members can be based in one of two ways. Inspectors based at the FAA office that holds the airline’s operating certificate work full time on the ATOS team.-FAA included two kinds of guidance in ATOS to help a team plan and carry out inspections of the airline it oversees. First, automated ATOS planning guidance is used to develop the comprehensive surveillance plan for each airline. The planning guidance calls for using existing safety data, risk indicators, and the inspectors’ knowledge of an airline’s operations to determine whether the airline has systems in places to ensure safety and a second series of inspections to verify that the airlin...
