Newsstand - NASA hides Air Safety Survey of Pilots

I thought I was kinda shocked out, but this story really zapped me. :td:

NASA Sits on Air Safety Survey

By RITA BEAMISH

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. (AP) — Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.

NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge the results publicly.

Just last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers.

The Associated Press 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 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."

Full story at:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jKO38hKOG37Omy4Iv7Bi9q_L98bQ

Moving to Newsstand.

Jouy31
Travelbuzz moderator

The ostrich approach always works. Appalling.

I thought I was kinda shocked out, but this story really zapped me. :td:

NASA Sits on Air Safety Survey

By RITA BEAMISH

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. (AP) —
A senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said revealing the findings could damage the public's confidence in airlines and affect airline profits.

Full story at:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jKO38hKOG37Omy4Iv7Bi9q_L98bQ

Yeah, nothing like protecting airline profits at the expense of human lives.

Yeah, nothing like protecting airline profits at the expense of human lives.

Fatal accidents are down over 60% over the past decade.

I cant beleive this isn't a hot topic on Flyertalk. The report has incidents like pilots falling asleep at the yoke (both at the same time). Near collisons in the air and on the ground. I can't wait to read this report.

Announced Wed., Oct. 31. Full article on cnn.com here. (http://www.cnn.com/2007/TRAVEL/10/31/air.safety.secrets.ap/index.html)

Until several decades ago, air safety focused mainly on investigating accidents and learning how to prevent them from reoccurring. By the 1980s the accident rate for commercial aviation had been reduced so much that there weren't very many accidents occurring to study and those that did occur often had unique causal factors that hadn't been uncovered in previous accidents.

In order to continue improvement airline safety the focus shifted to investigating accidents that DIDN'T happen. To gather data on occurrences which did not develop into accidents you need information from people who made mistakes or inadvertently broke some rules. Such people will be unlikely to come forward with this information if they believe that doing so will get them in trouble so programs were developed which allowed the anonymous reporting of safety events. The data collected is de-identified before being entered in a database that is then used to look for trends which need to be addressed.

The largest such program is the Aviation Safety Reporting System (http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/) and is administered by NASA. Many airlines also have an in-house version of this program which allows company, FAA and union safety officials to directly address the de-identified reports from within the company at the same time that the report is forwarded to the ASRS.

I don't know a lot of specifics on the particular program that is being discussed here but it appears to be a confidential survey of pilots looking for safety issues and trends that need to be addressed. The methodology would be similar to the programs I've described above where the de-identified data is entered into a database for trend identification and tracking.

If NASA released the information prior to it being de-identified it would completely undermine their ability to gather this type of critical safety information in the future. Once de-identified and cataloged, all of this information is available to the public.

One notable result from the ASRS was the identification of a problem with altitude assignments involve 10,000' and 11,000'. ASRS found that those two altitude assignements had a disproportional number of errors and deviations so the phraseology used for these altitudes was modified to allow for the restating of then altitude. i.e. "one-zero thousand, ten-thousand" and "one-one thousand, eleven thousand".