FAA Flight Plan Performance Report
Flight Plan Performance Report
FAA Flight Plan 2nd Quarter Performance Report — March 2008
What is the Flight Plan?
It is FAA's strategic plan for 2008 through 2012. Our mission is to provide the safest and most efficient aerospace system in the world. The Flight Plan provides the foundation for achieving this mission based on four goal areas: Increased Safety, Greater Capacity, International Leadership, and Organizational Excellence. Our 2008 — 2012 Flight Plan is available on the FAA website.
How do we tie pay to performance?
As a pay-for-performance agency, FAA uses a performance-based system for compensating our executives and over 80 percent of our employees. Their pay is adjusted each year based on the agency's success in meeting the Flight Plan corporate performance targets. All employee performance plans are linked directly back to those targets. For employees under the performance-based plan, their pay raise is based on an organizational success increase (OSI). A full incentive OSI payout requires us to meet at least 90 percent, or 26 out of 29, of the Flight Plan performance targets.
How are we doing?
By the end of the second quarter, 76 percent of our metrics were on target. We had a total of 5 red and 2 yellow performance targets. Those are targets that are not tracking satisfactorily, are at risk of not meeting a significant milestone, or have missed a significant milestone.
For Increased Safety, the Alaska Accidents target ended the quarter red. There were a total of 31 accidents, putting us over our not-to-exceed target of 27. To reduce these accidents in Alaska, our main focus is on improving training and safety awareness. Another red target was Runway Incursions. We ended the quarter for category A&B runway incursions at .527 per million operations, above our not-to-exceed target of .509. Our focus here is primarily on general aviation as they contributed to 80 percent of the runway incursions. Our action plan to reduce them is producing positive results. Since the first quarter we have seen a 16 percent improvement as the trend continues to move towards the positive. We feel confident that we will meet our year-end target. In addition, our Operational Errors target ended the quarter red with 2.29 A&B operational errors, missing our not-to-exceed target of 2.15.
In the Greater Capacity goal area, we missed our target for NAS On-Time Arrivals. We ended the quarter with an 86.06 percent on-time arrival rate measured against our goal of 88 percent. This was mainly due to adverse weather conditions at some of our busiest airports causing system-wide problems.
We are on track to meet all four targets in the International Leadership goal area.
For the Organizational Excellence goal area, there are1 red and 2 yellow targets that we need to focus on, particularly in order to meet our year-end targets: Reduce Workplace Injuries and Clean Audit were yellow while the Air Traffic Controller (ATC) Workforce was red. The Reduce Workplace Injuries target has gone to yellow this quarter due to an increase in job-related injuries and illnesses. We are reviewing the data to determine if there are any trends in order to recommend corrective actions. The Clean Audit target was written to include no material weaknesses, and because we received a material weakness due to issues with asset capitalization in FY 2007, we continue to keep this yellow as a precautionary measure while we focus our energies in this area. We are confident that we will meet our Clean Audit Goal by the end of the fiscal year. The ATC Workforce plan target is red because attrition was higher than expected. We have taken corrective hiring actions to mitigate possible higher ATC attrition in the future to ensure that we meet our hiring goals by the end of the fiscal year.
Where are we going?
Our focus continues to be on safety. We will continue to strive to improve what is already the safest period in aviation history. To do this, we will remain committed to being accountable for the goals we have set for ourselves. We will continue to track our progress towards implementing the Flight Plan and challenge ourselves to perform at an even higher level. I invite you to keep coming back to see how we are doing in meeting our Flight Plan performance targets.
Robert A. Sturgell
Acting Administrator
