NASA released a redacted version of a massive air-safety survey of airline pilots on its website, which includes thousands of pages of complaints from pilots about crew fatigue, air traffic congestion and communications.
Under pressure from Congress, NASA released Monday partial results of the survey of pilots who repeatedly complained about fatigue, problems with air-traffic controllers, airport security, and the layouts of runways and taxiways.
Reacting to criticism about its initial decision to withhold the database for fear of harming airlines' bottom lines, NASA released the survey.
The NASA database, which includes more than 10,000 pages of information, was based on extensive telephone polling about incidents ranging from engine failures and bird strikes to fires onboard planes and encounters with severe turbulence. The survey cost about 11 million U.S. dollars and was conducted from 2001 to 2004.
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has questioned the validity of the survey. None of the data "should be viewed or considered at this stage as having been validated," Griffin told reporters in a conference call Monday afternoon.
"It's hard for me to see any data the traveling public would care about or ought to care about," he said. "We were asked to release the data, and we did."
Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, said that the agency should not have redacted so much of the data nor released it in a format that made it difficult to analyze. He promised more hearings into the matter.
The debate over the database comes as U.S. commercial aviation is enjoying its safest period in history, according to Federal Aviation Administration officials. The last major fatal U.S. air crash occurred in August 2006.
FAA officials said they had no plans to launch an independent study of the survey. But the FAA was looking at ways to "integrate the data with the existing data we have," said Laura Brown, an FAA spokeswoman.
Source:Xinhua/Agencies
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