News-Record.com

So, it turns out getting crammed into that little tiny seat isn't your biggest worry if you're flying these days. From the Washington Post:

NASA begrudgingly released some results Monday 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.

I post this hear not because you need another reason to be scared, but because Rep. Brad Miller (a Democrat who represents Greensboro and Raleigh) had a hand in getting NASA to "begrudgingly released some results." Miller had this to say in a statement this afternoon:

NASA today dumped three-year-old, unanalyzed data from more than 25,000 interviews of commercial and general aviation pilots on aviation safety. According to NASA, they never intended to analyze the data, just test the "methodology" used for the interviews. The taxpayers who paid $11.5 million for the surveys and the pilots who spent 12,000 hours answering the survey questions hoped for more. They hoped the survey would lead to improved aviation safety.

NASA said others can now analyze the data, but NASA scrubbed much of the information that would be important for any analysis. Eighty percent of the pilots asked to participate in the half-hour survey agreed. Those pilots obviously wanted others to know their observations and experiences. It is hard to imagine that those pilots would want useful information scrubbed from the data out of a fear that stray bits of information might somehow be connected to identify a specific pilot's answers to the survey.

Many of NASA's statements today are contradicted by the testimony of several witnesses at the Science and Technology Committee hearing on October 31. Dr. Robert Dodd, who managed the survey, said the scientists and experts who conducted the survey hoped to turn the data "into useful information for decision makers." Dr. Dodd said that the "data is of good quality and ready for meaningful analysis."

Despite NASA's dismissal of surveys as a methodology for collecting accurate data, Dr. Jon Krosnik, a statistics professor at Stanford who helped design the survey, said that surveys are routinely used "to track rates of events over time and to inform decision-making and organizational practices." Every 10 years the US conducts an essential survey - the Census.

The original intent of the NAOMS was to develop possible "safety precursors" from the survey. Without further study of this data we will never know what these precursors are. I am will to assume however, that near-misses are a precursor to collisions. I urge NASA to get the remaining data out quickly and in a useful form.

NAOMS was an air safety survey of 24,000 of the nation's airline pilots, conducted over a number of years. NASA initially refused a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the data from the Associated Press citing it "could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of the air carriers..." Committee Members called NASA's refusal "troubling" and "unconvincing," and urged the agency to make the data available to the public.

Pressure from the Committee to speed release of the data resulted in the press conference today by NASA and an initial release of data from the study.