Warren Randolph is an aviation safety-data official who served on NASA's independent NASA UAP Study Team after holding FAA safety leadership roles. NASA named him to the 16-member team on October 21, 2022, identifying him as deputy executive director of the FAA's Accident Investigation and Prevention for Aviation Safety department, responsible for safety management system principles and data-informed assessment of emerging hazards and safety risks.1
The National Transportation Safety Board later appointed Randolph as its first chief data officer on February 27, 2024. NTSB said he came from the FAA, where he had served as deputy executive director of the Office of Accident Investigation and Prevention, previously directed the Analytical Services Division, managed programs including Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing, began in aviation as an aerodynamicist supporting U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Air Force flight simulations, held private-pilot and airframe-and-powerplant credentials, and earned a Bachelor of Science from Purdue University.2
FAA Safety Data Career
The public FAA record places Randolph in accident-prevention and safety-data work at least by September 23, 2014, when FAA Administrator Michael Huerta thanked "Warren" as manager of Accident Prevention's Integrated Safety Teams and Program Management Branch during Aviation Safety InfoShare remarks. Huerta's speech framed InfoShare, the Commercial Aviation Safety Team, voluntary reporting, and ASIAS as a move from accident forensics toward de-identified, nonpunitive data sharing for identifying precursors and systemic risks.3
By January 2021, Performance.gov listed Randolph as a Department of Transportation aviation-safety goal leader and deputy executive director of the FAA Office of Accident Investigation and Prevention. The same goal statement tied FAA programs to keeping the commercial-air-carrier fatality rate below a stated target and reducing general-aviation fatal accidents.4 In August 2021, a National Academies committee agenda listed Randolph, again as FAA deputy executive director of Accident Investigation and Prevention, giving the study sponsor perspective for an emerging-hazards-in-commercial-aviation review.5
Randolph's later NTSB biography connects those positions to ASIAS management, and FAA's own ASIAS report explains why that background mattered for a UAP data panel. The FAA report says ASIAS began in 2007 as a government-industry safety-analysis and data-sharing initiative, uses governance and de-identification protections, draws from FAA surveillance radar, operator flight data, safety reports, manufacturer information, and other National Airspace System data, and is intended to detect emerging hazards, monitor known risks, and evaluate mitigations.26
NASA UAP Assignment
NASA's October 21, 2022 announcement made Randolph one of 16 outside participants in a nine-month independent study beginning October 24. NASA said the group would use unclassified data, identify how civilian-government, commercial, and other data could be analyzed, and recommend a future roadmap for NASA UAP analysis. The agency framed UAP as observations not identifiable as aircraft or known natural phenomena, said the subject mattered for national security and air safety, and said limited data made it difficult to verify or explain observations.1
NASA's public biography for Randolph emphasized FAA safety management systems, future-hazard assessment, emerging safety risks, and earlier aerodynamicist work on Coast Guard and Air Force flight simulations, while the broader announcement described the team as scientists, data and artificial-intelligence practitioners, and aerospace-safety experts.1
NASA's May 12, 2023 media advisory said the May 31 public meeting would categorize and evaluate UAP data before the team issued its report, and it stressed that the work was not a review or assessment of previous unidentified observations.7 The meeting agenda assigned an FAA presentation to Mike Freie and "Reporting Challenges" to Karlin Toner and Josh Semeter, while the final all-panel discussions and public questions were listed for the full team rather than Randolph as a named presenter.8
Reporting Systems And Civilian Airspace
The 2023 NASA UAP Study Report treated civilian airspace data as useful but poorly optimized for rigorous UAP analysis. The report said FAA-related airspace data can include tower and radar information, but incidental observations often lack sensor metadata and are not designed for anomaly analysis. It also said there was then no standardized federal civilian UAP reporting system, producing sparse, unsystematic, weakly curated data.9
The final report recommended better use of the Aviation Safety Reporting System for commercial-pilot UAP reporting and suggested that NASA's long FAA partnership could support future air-traffic-management analysis.9 NASA's ASRS program says it captures confidential aviation safety reports, analyzes the resulting data, and disseminates safety information, while the FAA's ASIAS materials describe ASRS and other reporting streams as part of a broader de-identified safety-data ecosystem.106
FAA air-traffic orders also state a UAP reporting channel more directly. FAA Order JO 7110.65BB tells controllers to inform the operations supervisor or controller-in-charge of reported or observed UAP or unexplained phenomena activity.11 FAA Order JO 7210.3EE tells facilities to report pilot reports and air-traffic-personnel observations of UAP activity to the National Tactical Security Operations Air Traffic Security Coordinator team on the Domestic Events Network, with available aircraft, location, altitude, description, and radar-depiction details, and refers other reporters to AARO.12
Public Impact And Institutional Network
NASA released the final study report on September 14, 2023 and announced a director of UAP research in response to the team recommendation that NASA play a larger role in UAP data collection and analysis. The release said the report was not a review of previous incidents, that high-quality observations remained too limited for firm conclusions, and that NASA would engage the public and commercial pilots to build a broader, more reliable dataset while reducing stigma.13
Through these roles, Randolph linked FAA aviation-safety data, ASIAS hazard detection, commercial-pilot reporting, NTSB safety work, and NASA's problem of turning unusual observations into curated evidence that can be checked against ordinary airspace activity.26913
Evidence Limits
Randolph has not publicly claimed to be a UAP witness, experiencer, whistleblower, or crash-retrieval source, and no NASA, FAA, NTSB, ASRS, ASIAS, or AARO record describes him as one.12914 He was selected for the panel as an aviation-safety and data official, and the panel's central problem was how to collect, calibrate, curate, and interpret better UAP data.169
The final NASA report set strong limits around UAP interpretation. It said extraterrestrial life should be a hypothesis of last resort, that peer-reviewed scientific literature contained no conclusive evidence for an extraterrestrial origin of UAP, and that eyewitness reports can be interesting but are not reproducible and usually lack enough information for definitive provenance conclusions.9 AARO's 2024 historical review added that it found no evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel had confirmed a UAP sighting as extraterrestrial technology, and it linked many unresolved cases to limited or poor-quality data.14