NASA refuses to disclose results of survey of pilots on air safety

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. – Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.\nNASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge the results publicly.\nJust last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers.\nThe Associated Press 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.\nA senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said 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.”\nThe AP sought to obtain the survey data over 14 months under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.\n“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.\nAmong other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air 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.\nThe survey also revealed higher-than-expected numbers of pilots who experienced “in-close approach changes” – potentially dangerous, last-minute instructions to alter landing plans.\nOfficials at the NASA Ames Research Center in California have said they want to publish their own report on the project by year’s end.\nAlthough 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.\n“If the airlines aren’t safe I want to know about it,” said Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., chairman of the House Science and Technology investigations and oversight subcommittee. “I would rather not feel a false sense of security because they don’t tell us.”\nIn 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. Krosnick also led a Stanford team that paid for a joint AP-Stanford poll on the environment.\n“There are little things going on everyday that rarely lead to an accident but they increase the chances of an accident,” Krosnick said. “It’s the little things beneath the surface that cause the very infrequent crashes. You have to tackle those.”\nNASA directed its contractor Battelle Memorial Institute, along with subcontractors, on Thursday to return any project information and then purge it from their computers before Oct. 30.