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NASA to Be Questioned on Pilot Safety Study

Posted on: Wednesday, 24 October 2007, 12:00 CDT

By Matthew L. Wald

A U.S. House committee said it would hold hearings into why NASA is withholding 24,000 responses by pilots for airlines and other companies to a government-sponsored safety survey.

The panel asked the agency on Monday to hand over an electronic copy of the data to ensure that it would not be destroyed.

The committee and the agency are arguing over a telephone survey of about 8,000 pilots, conducted repeatedly over several months in an effort to track safety problems and determine whether they were worsening.

The survey was recommended in 1997 by a White House panel on aviation safety. The interviews were completed in early 2005.

The questionnaires ask about bird strikes, near collisions in the air and on runways, last-second changes in landing instructions from air traffic controllers and other problems.

Two people involved in the data gathering, who asked not to be identified because they had been ordered by NASA not to discuss the findings, said that the answers indicated that the Federal Aviation Administration had underestimated the rate of safety-related events.

A NASA spokesman, David Mould, said Monday that the purpose of the study was "to develop methodologies" for analyzing data, not to find what the data would show. But Mould said that the data from the questionnaires would be turned over to an airline pilots' union and to a partnership between the airlines and the FAA, possibly by year's end.

The deputy associate administrator for aviation safety at the FAA, Peggy Gilligan, said that her agency had been briefed on the survey results but had not examined the underlying data. But she cast doubt on its value, saying the answers were not sufficiently detailed to determine, for example, whether two pilots describing similar problems were in fact talking about the same event.

Mould and the agency's acting administrator, Bobby Sturgell, said that they did not know whether the NASA data recorded higher rates than their agency did of events like planes coming too close on the runway surface or in the air.

The FAA said that some problems covered by the questionnaire were becoming less severe, as measured by its own data, which it characterized as more detailed and rigorous. The number of "runway incursions," in which a plane, vehicle or even a person is on the wrong spot on a runway, is down, it said, and the number of times that planes aloft came too close together has also declined.

The FAA has been criticized by the National Transportation Safety Board for not developing a cockpit warning system to prevent runway collisions. It is undertaking an urgent program, with the airports and the airlines, to reduce those risks and is also speeding the deployment of a system that warns tower controllers.

The Associated Press had sought the NASA survey data under the Freedom of Information Act. The news agency reported Monday that in a letter refusing the request, NASA said that release of the data "could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey."

The FAA has long struggled with what to say publicly about the safety of individual airports or airlines. The agency was established in part to promote aviation, but in 1996, Congress decided that this job was in conflict with its role as a regulator, and removed promotion from its mission.

NASA's mission includes helping to sustain the country's pre- eminence in aviation.

On Friday, Representative Brad Miller, a Democrat from North Carolina and chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology, wrote in a letter to the NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, that possible damage to the image of the airline industry "does not appear to fall within any of the exceptions" to the Freedom of Information law, and that not releasing the information would be contrary to NASA's mission of improving the safety and efficiency of airplanes.

Protecting airlines from public concern about safety, Miller said, was not part of the agency's mission.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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