NASA RELUCTANTLY RELEASES AIRLINE SAFETY STUDY

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NASA reluctantly releases airline safety study

By Rita Beamish
Associated Press
The Houston Chronicle
Monday, December 31, 2007

NASA begrudgingly released some results today from an $11.3
million federal air safety study it previously withheld
from the public over concerns it would upset travelers and
hurt airline profits.

It published the findings in a format that made it
cumbersome for any thorough analysis by outsiders. Released
on New Year's Eve, the unprecedented research conducted
over nearly four years relates to safety problems
identified by some 29,000 pilots interviewed by telephone.

Earlier characterizations from people who have seen the
results said they would show that events like near
collisions and runway interference occur far more
frequently than previously recognized. Such information
could not be gleaned from the 16,208 pages posted by NASA
on its Web site, however, because of information that was
edited out. The data was based on interviews with about
8,000 pilots per year from 2001 until the end of 2004.

The NASA Web site shows formatted, printed reports that the
space agency scrubbed to ensure none of the pilots who were
interviewed and promised anonymity could potentially be
identified. The data was posted as NASA officials began a
telephone news conference, allowing no time to look at the
material and ask them questions about it.

NASA did not provide documentation on how to use its data,
nor did it provide keys to unlock the cryptic codes used in
the dataset.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told reporters the
agency typically releases information in Adobe System's
portable document format, known as pdf, which presents the
information on formatted, printed pages. But there are
dozens of reports available from NASA's Web site about
other subjects in Microsoft's Excel data format, which
would permit researchers to conduct a meaningful analysis
more easily.

Griffin said NASA wanted to ensure that no one modified the
survey results and circulated false data as NASA's research
product. He said even inexpensive optical character
recognition software could convert the formatted reports.
Such software can risk introducing errors in the data as it
performs these conversions.

"We've gone the extra mile with this data, and well beyond
our original intentions," Griffin said.

He dismissed suggestions that NASA chose to release the
data late on New Year's Eve, when the public is distracted
by holidays and news organizations are thinly staffed.

"We didn't deliberately choose to release on the slowest
news day of the year," Griffin said.

NASA drew harsh criticism from Congress and news
organizations for keeping the information secret. Rejecting
an Associated Press request under the Freedom of
Information Act, NASA explained that it did not want to
undermine public confidence in the airlines or hurt airline
fortunes.

Griffin later overruled his staff and promised Congress
that he would release at least some data by the end of the
year.

NASA's survey, the National Aviation Operations Monitoring
System, was launched to see if a massive pilot survey would
help pinpoint problems and prevent accidents. Survey
planners said it was unique because it was a random survey,
with an 80 percent response rate, that did not rely on
pilots to take the initiative to report problems but rather
reached out and interviewed them.

Griffin said NASA never intended to analyze the data it
collected, but rather they planned on passing on its
methodology to the aviation community.

He said he had only looked at a few results, but that,
"It's hard for me... to see any data here that the
traveling public would care about or ought to care about."
That would be up to others who chose to analyze the data,
he said.

Pilots were asked how many times they encountered safety
incidents in flight and on the ground, such as near-
collisions, equipment failure, runway interference, trouble
communicating with the tower and unruly passengers.

Griffin outraged some NASA employees by saying the project
had been poorly managed and its methodology not properly
vetted. Survey experts who worked on it, however, said they
used state-of-the-art industry techniques and carefully
validated the results.

NASA's handling of the matter prompted a congressional
investigation and separate investigations by its inspector
general and by a union representing NASA workers.

Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who helped
design the project for NASA, said the release of
information was inadequate.

"The data they released are intentionally designed to
prevent people from analyzing the rates properly and are
designed to entrap analysts into computing rates that are
much higher than the survey really shows," he said Monday.

More at:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5413336.html

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