s and procedures before they can conduct inspection activities. The training on the airline’s policies and procedures familiarizes inspectors with the approved operating procedures of the airline they oversee.-FAA included several features in ATOS to address past concerns about the usefulness of inspection data for analysis and targeting. First, the standardization of inspections and the development of guidance for planning and conducting inspections are steps intended to improve the quality of FAA’s data by making inspections more systematic and thorough. Second, FAA created a new position within the ATOS team overseeing each airline: a data evaluation program manager, whose job will be to review data for validity, accuracy, and completeness before they are finalized in theATOS database for analysis. ATOS also added a new position for an analyst on each team. The analyst is responsible for collecting and analyzing data to support inspection planning and retargeting. Finally, FAA included features in ATOS to improve the targeting of inspection resources. FAA designed ATOS to allow the targeting of inspections based on an airline’s size, operations, past history, and known problem areas. Finally, ATOS gives inspectors the flexibility to retarget resources at any point during the year based on inspection results.-Although ATOS calls for (1) more systematic, structured inspections, (2) closer links between inspectors’ training and their assigned work responsibilities, and (3) greater use of team inspections to improve inspection quality, its success in the first 6 months has been limited to: -Inspection guidance is not complete and is not sufficiently clear and detailed to accomplish the systematic, structured inspections promised by the ATOS concept.-ATOS has not resolved the long-standing problems with matching inspectors’ qualifications to their work assignments.-Team inspections are hampered by pro...
