A bizarre story going on here. A few years back, NASA (which does do research into air safety in its “aeronautic” capacity) started a survey of pilots that came back with some very disturbing results, indicating that flight safety incidents were much more frequent than other data from the FAA showed.
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.
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.
[…] 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.
Though the survey was supposed to be expanded from pilots to air traffic and ground crew personnel, NASA pulled the plug on the project (ostensibly because of budget shifts to the Mars program), and sat on the data for the last year. The AP — which heard about the results — tried to get the study released under the Freedom of Information Act, but NASA refused, citing this odd reason:
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.”
“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.
NASA then went further to make sure nobody would see it.
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 October 30. […] Congress intervened Monday, saying it will launch a formal investigation and instruct NASA to keep all its data. [NASA [Administrator Michael] Griffin said he already was ordering that all survey data be preserved.
“People might get worried, and that would hurt the airline industry.” A fine reason to suppress safety findings. Yeesh.
Well, it *is* all about profit, so of course it was suppressed. i mean with a study like that you would cost the airline industry big dollars, and they already pay plenty money to politicians not have anything come along that could cut into the bottom line.
Also, if this was to come out then it would completely destroy the GOP myth that government is bad and folks might start insisting that the FAA do something…and the gutting of the FAA over the past seven years would have to be reversed so that things could be safer.
Sheesh, do you hate America that much or what Dave. ;P