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NASA Insults Pilots, Press and Public

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 4, 2008

Pressured by Congress to release by year's end information collected on air safety from thousands of pilots, NASA played a trick on everyone.

The agency made public on New Year's Eve a hodgepodge of scrambled numbers and letters. The report was incoherent.
NASA chief Michael Griffin seemed to think that ended the matter, saying, "It's hard for me to see any data here that the traveling public would care about or ought to care about."

This insult comes after the agency originally refused to release the information to the Associated Press on the grounds it "could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers."

Which is it: too frightening or nothing to see?

We deserve better, and if we don't get it, NASA needs better leadership.

Unverified accounts say the interviews with 8,000 pilots a year for four years reveal more close calls than the pilots voluntarily reported to the Federal Aviation Administration - more near run-ins on the runway, more midair hits of birds, more near collisions with other planes, more misunderstood directions, more engine shutdowns and more hard landings.

NASA says it was only trying to find better ways to collect data, not produce an exhaustive report on safety. But it shouldn't take 24,000 anonymous interviews with pilots to learn how to get pilots to talk.

Pilots risk their own lives daily in the system and have no reason to hide dangers or be shy about how to improve it. As all pilots know, the challenge of flying is not that it's so difficult but that it's so unforgiving.

Now that a wealth of pilot data has been assembled, it deserves to be understood and shared, not just with those who run the system, but with all of us it serves.

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