The NASA ASRS report is an anonymous safety report that pilots and air traffic controllers can use to report that they violated an FAR unintentionally. Not to say that the only time you can use it is if you're in trouble. You could use it to report unusually large amounts of birds in the vicinity of an airport if you wanted.

Why would you want to do it? In the interest of actually getting information from pilots when mistakes are made, the FAA won't suspend or revoke your certificates if they investigate you and decide to take enforcement actions.

There are a few caveats to this.

1. You must have submitted the report within 10 days of the event. Meaning, if you get a letter of investigation from the FAA 6 months after you accidentally flew into restricted airspace, you can't just make an asrs after the mail man leaves back dated 6 months.

2. The violation must not have been intentional.

3. You must not have been found guilty of violating the FARs within the past 5 years.

4. If you're trying to cover for illegal activity (drugs, terrorism), the information will be forwarded to authorities and losing your certs will be the least of your problems!

So, lets say you accidentally bust a restricted airspace. You file an ASRS report the day after and get a receipt saying you filed an ASRS report on such and such a date (anonymous remember, it won't say what you did, just that you filed a report). A month later you get a letter of investigation from the FAA about your foray into restricted airspace. They'll ask if you have anything to say or add. By the way, if the FAA sends this notice, it pretty much means they've basically already finished their investigation and are just seeing what you'll say. This is where you bring up your ASRS report (you haven't violated the FARs in the last 5 years). In the end, you will probably still be found guilty. HOWEVER, due to the ASRS report, they will waive the enforcement action of suspending or revoking your certificates. This is assuming they don't think it was intentional or for drugs.

It still goes on your record that you had a violation, but you will still be able to fly without interruption which is quite important if it's your primary income means.

The NASA ASRS report is something a pilot can fill out to self disclose an incident that did not comply with the FARs. For example, a VFR pilot accidentally ventured into Class B airspace without a clearace.

The FAA is more interested in figuring out the root causes of why an incident happened then punishing the pilot. There are situations where filing a NASA ASRS report can be detrimental to the pilot. FAR 91.25 states the FAA will not use information discovered on the report against a pilot except for accidents and criminal offenses.

It is generally accepted that if you know that you broke one of the hundreds of FAR's that you self disclose the information to the FAA. If the FAA decided to pursue enforcement actions from the incident, the NASA ASRS report can be used as a "get out of jail card". It is important to note that "get out of jail card" is good once every five years or so.