Says NAOMS Survey Could Have Been Handled MUCH Better

When it comes to NASA's bungling of its handling of a massive safety survey, even the agency's own investigators say NASA could have -- and should have -- done a better job.

On Tuesday, NASA's inspector general office said what many in the aviation business already suspected: that NASA shut down the project too early, and did a decidedly half-hearted job of discerning the information it contained, reports MSNBC.

As ANN reported, NASA published 16,208 pages of results from the National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service (NAOMS) survey in the closing hours of 2007, 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.

The Associated Press 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.

The survey results painted a grim picture of several potential safety problems, ranging from pilot fatigue to runway incursions... but did not, arguably, present anything pilots did not already know. What is curious, however, is NASA's repeated assertions no one should read too much into the data, which the agency maintains was flawed from the start.

In essence, the auditor said "hogwash" to that claim this week... even suggesting NASA deliberately obfuscated the data released on December 31.

"The government may have missed an opportunity to foster a deeper understanding of the aviation safety environment from 2001 to 2004 because its working groups were unable to reach a consensus on the validity or value of the NAOMS data," the audit reads. "As a result NASA was reluctant to publish a report detailing research and conclusions garnered from the collected NAOMS survey data."

A NASA spokesman declined to comment to MSNBC on the matter Monday, saying he was not aware the audit had been released.

FMI: www.nasa.gov