Air Safety Details Held Up

Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007 | 8:37 a.m.

NASA may take as long as a year to tell the public what thousands of airline pilots had to say about air safety in an unprecedented survey. Congressional overseers on Thursday criticized the time frame as unacceptably long.

The agency told Congress it could take that long to pore through more than 24,000 interviews and remove anything that could potentially help identify the pilots who were interviewed anonymously between 2001 and 2004.

Some information is expected by the end of the year, as promised by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, possibly with fields of data removed pending conclusion of the vetting.

Griffin had agreed to release the survey information that is not confidential after lawmakers criticized his agency's denial of an Associated Press request for the results. He rejected his subordinates' rationale that disclosure might undermine public confidence in the airlines and hurt the airlines' commercial fortunes. Griffin said NASA should open its research when possible.

NASA has provided the raw data to the House Science and Technology committee, which is investigating the agency's decisions on withholding it from the public. NASA officials told the committee staff last week that so far they had found only a few references to specific airlines in the data.

The pilots were promised confidentiality in the $11.3 million survey about their experiences in the cockpit. Their names were not included nor were they asked what airline they worked for. But NASA officials say that where airlines were voluntarily mentioned, details such as airport names and a pilot's flying experience conceivably could be pieced together to figure out the pilot's identity.

Taking as long as a year to complete the release is "totally unacceptable," committee leaders said in a letter to Griffin that was released Thursday.

"The taxpayers have paid for it, the data relates to public safety, and it should be made available without further delay," while still ensuring confidentiality, the committee chairman Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., said in a statement.

The letter also questioned why content of the survey, called the National Aviation Operations Monitoring System, appears to be protected more than another NASA-run project that collects voluntary, anonymous safety reports from pilots. Those reports, in the Aviation Safety Reporting System, are available online and often cite airport names, runway numbers, aircraft models and the title of the reporting pilot, Gordon's letter noted.

The NAOMS survey tracked numerical counts of incidents like near-collisions, runway incursions and equipment failures.