Agency Offers No Guidance In Making Sense Of Results
They didn't make it
easy... and that was probably intentional. On Monday -- in the
waning moments of 2007 -- NASA made good on its promise to release
details of an $11.3 million National Aviation Operations Monitoring
System study before the end of the year... but did so with little
fanfare, and even less help in making sense of the results.
The Associated Press reports NASA published 16,208 pages of
results from the survey, but did not provide any kind of 'roadmap'
to help understand them... leaving the media to make heads or tails
of the numbers, tallied from interviews with approximately 29,000
commercial and private pilots from 2001 through 2004 on what they
considered to be the most urgent safety matters.
As ANN reported, the AP first
broke the story of NASA's withholding of the survey in October,
after the agency denied repeated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
requests to release the data. The resulting furor prompted NASA
Administrator Michael Griffin to grudgingly promise before Congress
to release some of the findings -- all the while stating the
results shouldn't be considered the last word on safety, and the
general public shouldn't be alarmed to hear about the problems
facing pilots.
Griffin (below, right) reiterated those statements Monday. "It's
hard for me ... to see any data here that the traveling public
would care about or ought to care about," he said, repeating
earlier claims the survey was poorly managed.
Some might beg to
differ. Despite the agency's 'scrambling' of the results -- making
it impossible to determine trends in the data, or whether pilots
made multiple reports -- the survey still notes at least 1,266
incidents in which planes flew within 500 feet of each other, and
at least 1,312 altitude busts in which planes deviated over 300
feet from assigned altitudes. The survey also notes 166 reports of
pilots landing at airports without obtaining clearance to do so
from an active control tower, 513 hard landings, and 4,267 bird
strikes.
NASA appears to have deliberately obfuscated the presentation of
the results, said Stanford University professor and survey expert
Jon Krosnick -- who helped design the original survey for NASA. The
data released by the agency was "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.
And then there's the timing of the release... on the last day of
the year, when most news organizations are lightly staffed, and
thinking more about New Year's Eve parties.
"We didn't deliberately choose to release on the slowest news
day of the year," Griffin asserted (and if you believe that, I
have Jim's Glasair to sell you -- Ed.)
The FAA agrees with NASA's statements the data shouldn't be
taken as rote, saying the project's results show more safety
incidents than the agency's data. "It's just something that we're
going to have to try and understand," said Peggy Gilligan, a senior
FAA official, recently. "We are always interested in any kind of
safety data, but we always want to look at it in terms of its
quality, its quantity and how we're going to use it and what
assumptions underlie it."
Gilligan added the survey did not use official FAA report
language, and pilot responses were likely subjective.
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