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.

FMI: www.nasa.gov, www.faa.gov