"NASA Refuses to Disclose Air Safety Survey Results"

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

NASA Sits on Air Safety Survey
By RITA BEAMISH
The Associated Press


MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. (AP) - An unprecedented national survey of pilots by
the U.S. government has found that safety problems like near collisions and
runway interference occur far more frequently than previously recognized.
But the government is withholding the information, fearful it would upset
air travelers and hurt airline profits.

NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million federal safety project,
through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general
aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since shutting down the project more
than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge its survey data
publicly.

After The Associated Press disclosed details Monday about the survey and
efforts to keep its results secret, NASA's chief said he will reconsider how
much of the survey findings can be made public.

"NASA should focus on how we can provide information to the public, not on
how we can withhold it," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in a
statement. He said the agency's research and data "should be widely
available and subject to review and scrutiny."

Last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge
all related data from its computers. Congress on Monday announced a formal
investigation of the pilot survey and instructed NASA to halt any
destruction of records. Griffin said he already was ordering that all survey
data be preserved.

The AP learned about the NASA results from one person familiar with the
survey who spoke on condition of anonymity because this person was not
authorized to discuss them.

A senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said
earlier that revealing the findings could damage the public's confidence in
airlines and affect airline profits. Luedtke acknowledged that the survey
results "present a comprehensive picture of certain aspects of the U.S.
commercial aviation industry."

The AP sought to obtain the survey data over 14 months under the U.S.
Freedom of Information Act.

"Release of the requested data, which are sensitive and safety-related,
could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare
of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots
participated in the survey," Luedtke wrote in a final denial letter to the
AP. NASA also cited pilot confidentiality as a reason, although no airlines
were identified in the survey, nor were the identities of pilots, all of
whom were promised anonymity.

Griffin said NASA will reconsider its denial for the data to the AP.

Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird
strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government
monitoring systems show, according to a person familiar with the results who
was not authorized to discuss them publicly.

The survey also revealed higher-than-expected numbers of pilots who
experienced "in-close approach changes" - potentially dangerous, last-minute
instructions to alter landing plans.

Officials at the NASA Ames Research Center in California have said they want
to publish their own report on the project by year's end.

Although to most people NASA is associated with spaceflight, the agency has
a long and storied history of aviation safety research. Its experts study
atmospheric science and airplane materials and design, among other areas.

"If the airlines aren't safe I want to know about it," said Rep. Brad
Miller, D-N.C., chairman of the House Science and Technology investigations
and oversight subcommittee. "I would rather not feel a false sense of
security because they don't tell us."

Discussing NASA's decision not to release the survey data, Miller said:
"There is a faint odor about it all."

Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., wrote to NASA on Monday announcing an
investigation by the House Science and Technology committee which he chairs,
and directing the agency not to destroy documents. The letter instructed
NASA to provide Congress results and background on the survey and any
communications from airlines about how the data might harm them.

"I cannot imagine any good public purpose being served by destroying
records," Gordon said in a statement. "The committee will get to the bottom
of all of this."

The survey's purpose was to develop a new way of tracking safety trends and
problems the airline industry could address. The project was shelved when
NASA cut its budget as emphasis shifted to send astronauts to the moon and
Mars.

NASA said nothing it discovered in the survey warranted notifying the
Federal Aviation Administration immediately and data showed improvements in
some areas. Survey managers occasionally briefed the FAA. At a briefing in
April 2003, FAA officials expressed concerns about the high numbers of
incidents described by pilots because NASA's results were dramatically
different from the FAA's own monitoring systems showed.

An FAA spokeswoman, Laura Brown, said the agency questioned NASA's
methodology. The FAA is confident it can identify safety problems before
they lead to accidents, she said.

In its space program, NASA has a deadly history of playing down safety
issues. Investigators blamed the 1986 and 2003 shuttle disasters on poor
decision making, budget cuts and improperly minimizing risks. NASA decided
to go ahead with a 2006 shuttle launch and is moving ahead with one this
week despite safety concerns by NASA engineers in both cases.

Aviation experts said NASA's pilot survey results could be a valuable
resource in an industry where they believe many safety problems are
underreported, even while deaths from commercial air crashes are rare and
the number of deadly crashes has dropped in recent years.

"It gives us an awareness of not just the extent of the problems, but
probably in some cases that the problems are there at all," said William
Waldock, a safety science professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
in Prescott, Ariz. "If their intent is to just let it sit there, that's just
a waste."

Officials involved in the survey touted the unusually high response rate
among pilots, 80 percent, and said they believe it is more reliable than
reporting systems that rely on pilots to report incidents voluntarily.

"The data is strong," said Robert Dodd, an aviation safety expert hired by
NASA to manage the survey. "Our process was very meticulously designed and
very thorough. It was very scientific."

Pilot interviews lasted about 30 minutes, with standardized questions about
how frequently they encountered equipment problems, smoke or fire, engine
failure, passenger disturbances, severe turbulence, collisions with birds or
inadequate tower communication, according to documents obtained by the AP.

Pilots also were asked about last-minute changes in landing instructions,
flying too close to other planes, near collisions with ground vehicles or
buildings, overweight takeoffs or occasions when pilots left the cockpit.

"I don't believe it's in NASA's purpose and mission statement to protect the
underlying financial fortunes of the airlines," David Stempler, president of
the Potomac, Md.-based Air Travelers Association, said Monday. "They're to
provide safety information, and the consequences will fall where they may.
We still believe this is an extremely safe air travel system, but it could
be made even safer."

NASA's survey, known officially as the National Aviation Operations
Monitoring Service, started after a White House commission in 1997 proposed
reducing fatal air crashes by 80 percent as of this year. Crashes have
dropped 65 percent, with a rate of about 1 fatality in about 4.5 million
departures.

NASA had begun to interview general aviation pilots and initially planned to
interview flight attendants, air traffic controllers and mechanics before
the survey was halted.

In earlier interviews that helped researchers design the NASA survey, pilots
said airlines were unaware how frequently safety incidents occurred that
could lead to serious problems or even crashes, said Jon Krosnick, a survey
expert at Stanford University who helped NASA create the questionnaire.
Krosnick also led a Stanford team that paid for a joint AP-Stanford poll on
the environment.

"There are little things going on everyday that rarely lead to an accident
but they increase the chances of an accident," said Krosnick. "It's the
little things beneath the surface that cause the very infrequent crashes.
You have to tackle those."

NASA had directed its contractor Battelle Memorial Institute, along with
subcontractors, on Thursday to return any project information and then purge
it from their computers before Oct. 30.

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