NASA Sits on Air Safety Survey

A Continental Airlines worker rides down a baggage conveyor belt plane as a fuel truck pulls up at Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport in this Oct. 16, 2007, file photo. 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. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan, File) (Pat Sullivan - AP)

Officials at the NASA Ames Research Center in California have said they want to publish their own report on the project by year's end.

Although 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.

"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."

Discussing NASA's decision not to release the survey data, Miller said: "There is a faint odor about it all."

Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., wrote to NASA on Monday announcing an investigation by the House Science and Technology committee which he chairs, and directing the agency not to destroy documents. The letter instructed NASA to provide Congress results and background on the survey and any communications from airlines about how the data might harm them.

"I cannot imagine any good public purpose being served by destroying records," Gordon said in a statement. "The committee will get to the bottom of all of this."

The survey's purpose was to develop a new way of tracking safety trends and problems the airline industry could address. The project was shelved when NASA cut its budget as emphasis shifted to send astronauts to the moon and Mars.

NASA said nothing it discovered in the survey warranted notifying the Federal Aviation Administration immediately and data showed improvements in some areas. Survey managers occasionally briefed the FAA. At a briefing in April 2003, FAA officials expressed concerns about the high numbers of incidents described by pilots because NASA's results were dramatically different from the FAA's own monitoring systems showed.

An FAA spokeswoman, Laura Brown, said the agency questioned NASA's methodology. The FAA is confident it can identify safety problems before they lead to accidents, she said.

In its space program, NASA has a deadly history of playing down safety issues. Investigators blamed the 1986 and 2003 shuttle disasters on poor decision making, budget cuts and improperly minimizing risks. NASA decided to go ahead with a 2006 shuttle launch and is moving ahead with one this week despite safety concerns by NASA engineers in both cases.

Aviation experts said NASA's pilot survey results could be a valuable resource in an industry where they believe many safety problems are underreported, even while deaths from commercial air crashes are rare and the number of deadly crashes has dropped in recent years.

"It gives us an awareness of not just the extent of the problems, but probably in some cases that the problems are there at all," said William Waldock, a safety science professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. "If their intent is to just let it sit there, that's just a waste."