Pilot survey on safety: Should it be public?

Congress holds hearings on secret NASA data that reportedly found more problems than the FAA did.

By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 31, 2007 edition

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New York - Air travel is safer than it's ever been, says the Federal Aviation Administration, pointing to a record-low number of crashes.

Or is that really the case?

A secret survey of pilots done by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has reportedly found twice as many potentially disastrous mishaps – such as runway near misses, bird strikes, and dangerously close encounters in the sky – than the FAA statistics show.

But NASA has refused to release the data, even though the information was discovered by the Associated Press and reported last week. That has prompted a firestorm of criticism and charges that NASA undermined the perceived safety of the US aviation system.

On Wednesday, a congressional committee will call NASA on the carpet and demand an explanation. Lawmakers want to know whether the NASA survey indicates that the skies are really more dangerous than the FAA data indicate.

If they are, Congress wants to know if there is a serious problem with the FAA's method of collecting safety data that needs to be resolved.

Finally, Congress wants the answer to the question of whether this whole incident is nothing more than a tempest in a teapot created by NASA's decision to try to keep the survey secret. Many aviation experts say that a public explanation could have easily clarified the difference in the reported problems.

"I can't understand why anyone at NASA would try to suppress this kind of information," says Clint Oster, an aviation expert at Indiana University at Bloomington. "I have absolutely no increase in anxiety about flying as a result of this. NASA has simply mishandled a project they were doing."

The Associated Press spent more than a year trying to get access to the survey results, which were part of an $8.5 million project that interviewed more than 24,000 pilots during four years ending in 2005. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, NASA turned down the AP's request in September, stating the survey data was "sensitive and safety-related, [and] 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."

The AP report was based on interviews with sources who were familiar with the NASA survey.

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