JamesNoBrakes

The worst that is happening these days (if you go along with compliance philosophy and you didn't cause Air Force one to make a TCAS maneuver) is they'll have you do an hour or two of training with an instructor, no letters in your airman file, no record of enforcement actions. Very different than 2+ years ago, and that's really the worst case, some of these are being handled with counselings or having you do an AOPA course or something similar. These are all considered "compliance actions". After the inspector talks to you and finds out "what happened", it gets referred to the FAAST team where they figure out what kind of compliance action to take. It takes the FSDO a while to get the report from Air Traffic though, sometimes weeks, so don't expect a call or letter right away, but in reality the FSDO deals with these all the time and it's a relief to most inspectors that they don't have to process all the paperwork and enforcement stuff associated with how they went about these previously. There is a demographic/report portion of the Pilot Deviation that the inspector must fill out, to figure out why we are having PDs, such as are people getting enough rest, are runway signs brightly lit, are the frequencies too congested, etc. This is why they ask so many questions. You can google FAA Form 8020-18 to see for yourself. This has no bearing on the compliance action side of things, it's for the FAA to decide where they might have to allocate resources to make a dent in the PDs in the future.

Filing an ASRS report can't hurt, even before Compliance Philosophy a PD almost never came to that, because they were inadvertent actions by people that usually didn't have a history of doing it, so they were sent out warning-notices according to the enforcement rules that were in place at the time (not compliance philosophy). In some egregious cases that often involved multiple FAR violations, it would go down an enforcement road, which is where the ASRS could become beneficial, but one important thing to know about the ASRS is that it can waive the penalty, but not the decision, which goes on your record, so you would still be found to have violated a regulation, but if there was say a suspension period, that would be waived. Ultra-rare for a case to go down this road these days, but again, it can't hurt. The idea of compliance philosophy is to extend an ASAP-like program/mentality to everyone else. When airline pilots file an ASAP report, they are often able to do almost the exact same thing, discuss the event, do some retraining, and not have the pilot deviation go on their airman record. The idea is to be able to do the same thing in Part 91 and have the ability to "fix the problem", instead of "hammer the airman".

Hope this helps.