NASA: The survey results, which had been kept secret, won't be purged after all.
By Rita Beamish
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
MOFFETT FIELD - An unprecedented national survey of pilots by the U.S. government has found that safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than previously recognized. But the government is withholding the information, fearful it would upset air travelers and hurt airline profits.
NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million federal safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since shutting down the project more than a year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge its survey data publicly.
After The Associated Press disclosed details Monday about the survey and efforts to keep its results secret, NASA's chief said he will reconsider how much of the survey findings can be made public.
"NASA should focus on how we can provide information to the public, not on how we can withhold it," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement. He said the agency's research and data "should be widely available and subject to review and scrutiny."
Last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers. Congress on Monday announced a formal investigation of the pilot survey and instructed NASA to halt any destruction of records. Griffin said he already was ordering that all survey data be preserved.
The AP learned about the NASA results from one person familiar with the survey who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss them.
A senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said earlier that revealing the findings could damage the public's confidence in airlines and affect airline profits. Luedtke acknowledged that the survey results "present a comprehensive picture of certain aspects of the U.S. commercial aviation industry."
The AP sought to obtain the survey data over 14 months under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
"Release of the requested data, which are sensitive and safety-
related, 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," Luedtke wrote in a final denial letter to the AP. NASA also cited pilot confidentiality as a reason, although no airlines were identified in the survey, nor were the identities of pilots, all of whom were promised anonymity.
Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near midair collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show, according to a person familiar with the results who was not authorized to discuss them publicly.
The survey also revealed higher-than-expected numbers of pilots who experienced "in-close approach changes" - potentially dangerous, last-minute instructions to alter landing plans.
Officials with the city agency that operates Los Angeles International Airport declined to comment on the study Monday, saying they have not yet reviewed the findings.
At LAX , there have been eight runway incursions involving commercial airliners since Oct. 1, 2006.
The most serious incursion occurred just before 1 p.m. Aug. 16, when a WestJet Boeing 737 arriving from Calgary, Alberta, came within 37 feet of colliding with a Northwest Airlines Airbus A320 that was taking off for Memphis, Tenn., according to officials with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.
The Los Angeles airport commission agreed in August to spend up to $2 million to allow NASA's Ames Research Center to conduct a sixth safety study of LAX's north airfield.
The five previous studies, completed by aviation consulting groups, called for moving one of the northern runways at least 340feet toward the communities of Westchester and Playa del Rey.
In the meantime, the FAA and airport officials are negotiating a contract to install an experimental runway status light system on the northern runways by January 2009 at a cost of $3.5 million.
Although to most people NASA is associated with spaceflight, the agency has a long and storied history of aviation safety research. Its experts study atmospheric science and airplane materials and design, among other areas.
NASA said nothing it discovered in the survey warranted notifying the FAA immediately and data showed improvements in some areas. Survey managers occasionally briefed the FAA. At a briefing in April 2003, FAA officials expressed concerns about the high numbers of incidents described by pilots because NASA's results were dramatically different from what the FAA's own monitoring systems showed.
An FAA spokeswoman, Laura Brown, said the agency questioned NASA's methodology. The FAA is confident it can identify safety problems before they lead to accidents, she said.
Officials involved in the survey touted the unusually high response rate among pilots, 80 percent, and said they believe it is more reliable than reporting systems that rely on pilots to report incidents voluntarily.
"The data is strong," said Robert Dodd, an aviation safety expert hired by NASA to manage the survey. "Our process was very meticulously designed and very thorough. It was very scientific."
Pilot interviews lasted about 30minutes, with standardized questions about how frequently they encountered equipment problems, smoke or fire, engine failure, passenger disturbances, severe turbulence, collisions with birds or inadequate tower communication, according to documents obtained by the AP.
Pilots also were asked about last-minute changes in landing instructions, flying too close to other planes, near collisions with ground vehicles or buildings, overweight takeoffs or occasions when pilots left the cockpit.
"I don't believe it's in NASA's purpose and mission statement to protect the underlying financial fortunes of the airlines," David Stempler, president of the Potomac, Md.-based Air Travelers Association, said Monday. "They're to provide safety information, and the consequences will fall where they may. We still believe this is an extremely safe air travel system, but it could be made even safer."
NASA's survey, known officially as the National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service, started after a White House commission in 1997 proposed reducing fatal air crashes by 80 percent as of this year. Crashes have dropped 65 percent, with a rate of about 1 fatality in about 4.5 million departures.
NASA had begun to interview general aviation pilots and initially planned to interview flight attendants, air traffic controllers and mechanics before the survey was halted.
In earlier interviews that helped researchers design the NASA survey, pilots said airlines were unaware how frequently safety incidents occurred that could lead to serious problems or even crashes, said Jon Krosnick, a survey expert at Stanford University who helped NASA create the questionnaire.
"There are little things going on every day that rarely lead to an accident but they increase the chances of an accident," said Krosnick. "It's the little things beneath the surface that cause the very infrequent crashes. You have to tackle those."
