Fri, Dec 21, 2007
Agency Still Dealing With Fallout From Withholding Results
Not
only should NASA finally get around to publicly releasing the
results of a controversial $11.3 million federal air safety survey
of pilots, lawmakers said this week, the agency should also
consider resuming the survey to detect more potential air safety
issues.
As ANN reported, NASA spent
nearly four years conducting telephone surveys of some 29,000
commercial and general aviation pilots as part of the National
Aviation Operations Monitoring Service, asking them about near
misses in the air and on runways and cases in which air traffic
controllers changed landing instructions at the last second.
News the agency withheld the results of the survey was reported
in October by the Associated Press, which tried unsuccessfully to
obtain the survey results under the Freedom of Information Act over
a 14-month period.
On October 31, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said the
agency would release some results from the study by the end of the
year. (That hasn't happened yet --
Ed.)
Language calling for the resumption of the survey was included
by Congressional budget writers in the massive omnibus budget bill
for government agencies, according to AP. Lawmakers directed NASA
to spend some of its $625 million for aeronautics research on
studying the results, with an eye towards restarting the
survey.
The bill doesn't carry any legal weight, per se... but it does
show what Congress thinks of the matter.
A NASA spokesman declined to comment Wednesday. In statements
before a Congressional hearing in October, Griffin defended the
agency's withholding of the results on the basis the program wasn't
managed well, and the results weren't verified.
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