Oversight, Data, and the Safety Case: What GAO’s Osprey Report Signals for Federal Contractors
GAO’s December 2025 review of Osprey aircraft safety is formally about a joint aviation program, but its core message is broader: when safety (or mission assurance) depends on many organizations acting as one, performance failures often trace back to governance and information architecture as much as to engineering. GAO reports that, in fiscal years 2023 and 2024, the Marine Corps and Air Force experienced higher rates of the most serious Osprey accidents compared with their prior eight-year averages, and that there were 18 serious, non-combat accidents meeting DOD’s Class A/B severity thresholds. GAO further notes that the reported causes for serious accidents most often involved materiel failure of airframe or engine components and human error during operations or maintenance.
The report’s central diagnosis is that program stakeholders have not fully implemented a comprehensive process to identify, analyze, and respond to all safety risks—particularly where “system” engineering hazards intersect with “non-system” operational and maintenance realities. GAO highlights a persistent backlog of unresolved risks: stakeholders had closed 45 risk assessments but had not fully responded to 34 known system-related risks tied to potential component failures, and GAO found the median age of unresolved serious and medium system risks was about nine years. In practical terms, GAO is warning that risk registers can become archival artifacts unless they are tied to decision rights, funded mitigation paths, and a cadence of review that forces prioritization across a joint enterprise.
For federal contractors—especially primes and major subs on complex, safety-critical, or sustainment-heavy programs—the lessons are directly actionable. First, proposals and program execution plans should treat risk management as an operating system, not a compliance appendix: define how hazards are surfaced, how risks are triaged across engineering and operations, and how “accepted risk” decisions are documented and revisited. This aligns with GAO’s recommendation that DOD refine the joint program process to incorporate and prioritize both system and non-system safety risks. Second, governance must be explicit. GAO recommends an oversight structure with clearly defined roles and responsibilities to resolve known risks and to conduct periodic reviews. Contractors can preemptively build this into integrated master schedules, RACI matrices, and contractual data requirements, reducing the odds that “everyone owns it” becomes “no one owns it.”
Third, the report underscores that information-sharing is a safety control. GAO found gaps in proactive cross-service sharing of hazard and accident reporting, and long pauses in routine forums to exchange aircraft knowledge and emergency procedures. For contractors, this maps to a concrete performance differentiator: propose (and then run) disciplined, recurring cross-stakeholder technical exchanges; establish clear rules for what can be shared, when, and with whom; and ensure safety-critical lessons do not travel only through informal networks. GAO’s recommendations to update information-sharing agreements and to establish a recurring multi-service conference reflect that institutional need.
Finally, GAO’s maintenance-data findings are a warning that “digital thread” language is meaningless without data integrity controls. GAO describes widespread discrepancies in serialized component records—including thousands of discrepancies and dozens of overflown life-limited components across the joint program—driven in part by inconsistent tracking practices and incomplete historical documentation. Contractors supporting sustainment, logistics IT, or configuration management should treat auditability, traceability, and periodic validation as mission-critical deliverables, consistent with GAO’s recommendation for a comprehensive review of maintenance guidance and inspection procedures tied to serialized-component tracking.
Disclaimer: This article summarizes and comments on a GAO report for general informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice, does not create an attorney-client relationship, and should not be relied upon as a substitute for consultation with qualified counsel or program/safety experts for your specific facts.