For 18 months, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration used $8.5 million in taxpayers' money to interview 24,000 air carrier and general aviation pilots about air safety problems they encountered. The study was abruptly shut down and contractors conducting 30-minute interviews with pilots were told to destroy the data and keep their mouths shut.
NASA now refuses to release study results to the public, its associate administrator, Thomas Luedtke, arguing that the study "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."
To which NASA administrator Michael Griffin says, not true, but then adds to the mystery by saying he's researching laws to find out if the huge study can be declared secret and kept from the public as a security matter.
This is absurd. There surely are no "security" grounds requiring NASA to keep the survey results secret, and acting like a Nanny to protect tender ears of toddlers from bad news is not NASA's job either.
U.S. airlines carry more than 700 million passengers annually on domestic and international flights, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. And this does not include tens of thousands who fly in charter and corporate aircraft.
If the U.S. air traffic system is flawed—whether in pilot errors, inefficient airport operations, obsolete equipment, overworked traffic controllers or disruptive airline flight scheduling—the public not only has a right to know but the need to know in order to demand improvements.
Only when The Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information demand was the report released—two years after it was terminated in 2005 and hidden.
It doesn't take a cynic to wonder if NASA's clam-up is another White House effort to conceal bad news. The Federal Aviation Administration has been under fire during President Bush's six years in office, as air travel became a nightmare of flight delays and cancellations.
The fact that fatal air carrier accidents have been drastically reduced doesn't eliminate "little things" that pilots warned in the survey need solving. The survey found twice as many bird strikes on aircraft, incursions by taxiing aircraft on runways cleared for landing aircraft, and near-collisions in the air as previous studies.
Americans take bad news in stride—9/11, a war gone bad, job layoffs, devastating wildfires, Katrina, lies and abuses by their government. Glitches in air safety will be no surprise to the tens of millions who have endured the modern travails of air travel.
