NASA made good on its promise to release its airline safety survey by the end of the year, but did little more than post 6,208 pages of heavily-redacted — and ultimately meaningless — data on its Web site on the slowest news day of the year.
The Associated Press has an insightful writeup of this non-event. But as usual, it isn’t what the government said about aviation safety that’s significant. It’s the outside reaction that’s worth noting.
The Air Transport Association, the trade group for the airline industry, sent out a prepared statement almost as soon as the data was published. Almost as if they knew what was going to be said.
Lobbyist-in-chief James May offered these canned words to commemorate the event:
The United States has the safest air transportation system in the world, in large part due to the absolute commitment by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the airline industry to safety, including the proactive use of safety data and analysis.
And you know what, now we can all go back to believing May’s spin. Because the NASA study, which allegedly showed that near collisions and runway interference happen much more frequently than previously recognized, did not show any such dangers. Didn’t really show anything at all, for that matter.
Another group with an apparent heads-up on NASAs non-news was the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, which issued a statement urging NASA “not delay in their complete release of the data.”
Here’s Chairman Chairman Bart Gordon:
NASA itself concedes that this is not the most complete data set that they intend to release. I expect NASA to complete the data release process as soon as possible. Excessive delay would be in no one’s best interest.
Perhaps the only agency with an interest in all of this that didn’t have a preview of NASA’s censored report was the FAA. On Friday, it cast doubts on the accuracy of the NASA data. Had it know that there was nothing to worry about, I doubt it would have made those statements.
So why does any of this matter? Well, you think air travel is safe, right?
What if it isn’t?
Think about it. Would you really trust the lives of you and your family to a company that is operating its planes unsafely?
It’s time for NASA to release all the data in a format that can be easily understood by the general public. Name names.
Our taxpayer dollars fund NASA. This is our data.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I love it when people can comment on thick documents within minutes. The sad thing is that the press cycle is so fast these days the journalists will not get the time to actually read the document and write a serious analysis [assuming the doc contains data that can be analyzed].
Why is this released if nobody is going to analyze it?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 2, 2008
Contact:
Tom Sullivan, “Quiet Rockland”: 1-845-480-1088, “http://www.quietrockland.com”
John J. Tormey III, Esq.: 1-212-410-4142
ROCKLAND COUNTY, NEW YORK CITIZEN GROUP “QUIET ROCKLAND” CALLS ON U.S. CONGRESS AND THE GAO TO INVESTIGATE NASA’S ISSUANCE OF ITS $11 MILLION, 16,000-PAGE “AIR SAFETY SURVEY”
Rockland County, NY – January 2, 2008: Livid that NASA and the FAA now appear to have acted in concert towards a common goal of concealing vital air traffic safety information from flyers and others on the ground, and in solidarity with a call for further hearings by Chairman of House Science and Technology Committee, Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), suburban New York activist group “Quiet Rockland” today called upon Congress and its investigative arm the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to examine and compel correction of NASA’s just-issued “Air Safety Survey”.
John J. Tormey III, attorney with “Quiet Rockland”, said: “NASA Administrator Michael Griffin admitted that his agency’s release of the Survey’s data occurred late on New Year’s Eve. He then assured all of us that NASA ‘didn’t deliberately choose to release on the slowest news day of the year’. Griffin and NASA doth protest too much. The NASA survey data was issued in a redacted and deliberately-indecipherable manner. NASA previously sought to withhold the totality of this same data at least once before, when NASA rejected a prior AP FOIA request for it. Of course NASA sought to bury its New Year’s information-release amongst the champagne corks and the dropping ball. Griffin’s suggestion otherwise insults the intelligence of the American public.
“In response, Quiet Rockland schedules this press release to arrive on what should be one of the busiest back-to-work news days of the new year. 2008 will be the year that we mandate transparency of government. We cannot trust NASA management to communicate fairly or candidly to the American people. It is pathetic that this once-majestic agency of the Apollo era, no longer able to put astronauts on the Moon, and facing difficulty keeping a number of its recently-launched spacecraft intact, now cannot even terrestrially adopt precision or seriousness of purpose beyond that of Captain Anthony Nelson, Major Roger Healy, and Barbara Eden’s ‘Jeannie’. How dare NASA play space games with our safety!
“The organizational ineptitude of NASA management is particularly threatening in light of yet another recent runway incident between two planes over the Holidays, once again at LAX, involving pilot miscommunications with an air traffic controller. NASA’s ostensible collaboration with its cousin-agency FAA towards concealing safety information from Americans, is confluent with the overall objective of the aero-mercantile complex to over-schedule flights and over-saturate our skies. With focus only upon the almighty buck, these un-checked rogue agencies continue to act at the expense of citizen and environmental safety and health. FAA’s “NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign” is another component of this same harmful aviation special-interest plan. That Redesign must be and will be defeated by citizen outcry such as that voiced by ‘Quiet Rockland’, not to mention the pending federal court litigations and Congressional action against it, taken in the interests of making our skies and our homes safer.
“NASA and Administrator Michael Griffin indicate that they have no intention to analyze or study, much less further report to the public or press upon the 16,000-plus pages of raw data in the ‘Air Safety Survey’. ‘Quiet Rockland’ therefore asks that Congress and the GAO: (1) audit and investigate NASA’s purposeful mishandling and cheeky and contemptuous New Year’s Eve issuance of purposefully-obfuscated and misleading data; and (2) order NASA to marshal and digest the Survey data and report to Congress, the GAO, and the media on it, in a fully-intelligible writing, within thirty calendar days after the date of this press release. Given NASA’s proclivity to hide from the truth, ‘Quiet Rockland’ suggests Groundhog Day as the most fitting date imaginable for that next report’s issuance.
“Of the current Survey, Griffin says ‘It’s hard for me… to see any data the traveling public would care about or ought to care about’. ‘Quiet Rockland’ assures Griffin and NASA that anecdotes extracted from the current Survey such as “pilot difficulties in talking to controllers in busy airspace’; air traffic control “capacity inadequate to handle traffic load”; “too many people on the frequency…causing a safety problem”; and perhaps worst of all, “pilots asleep” on the “flight deck”, are most definitely “cared about” by the traveling public – and will indubitably also be “cared about” by the many travelers who comprise Congress, the GAO, and the federal judiciary.”