NASA barely keeps promise to release safety study info by year’s end

Remember that airline safety study that NASA worked so hard to keep secret and then said they’d publish after their Director got hauled up in front of Congress? Well, they said they’d release it by the end of 2007 and they did – barely.

NASA begrudgingly released some results Monday from an $11.3 million federal air safety study it previously withheld from the public over concerns it would upset travelers and hurt airline profits.

It published the findings in a format that made it cumbersome for any thorough analysis by outsiders. Released on New Year’s Eve, the unprecedented research conducted over nearly four years relates to safety problems identified by some 29,000 pilots interviewed by telephone.

Earlier characterizations from people who have seen the results said they would show that events like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than previously recognized. Such information could not be gleaned from the 16,208 pages posted by NASA on its Web site, however, because of information that was edited out. The data was based on interviews with about 8,000 pilots per year from 2001 until the end of 2004.

This story so clearly shows the AP’s disgust with NASA over this whole issue that it can hardly be called an unbiased report. Between complaining about the format of the release (the AP would have preferred the data in Excel format instead of PDF) and the whining about how the data was released during the news conference so the reporters couldn’t see the data before having to ask their questions, it’s pretty clear that both the AP reporter and his editors want to paint NASA in the worst possible light in this situation.

That said, NASA’s making it easy for that kind of light to be used.

NASA did not provide documentation on how to use its data, nor did it provide keys to unlock the cryptic codes used in the dataset.

Cute. Encoded data without the key is next to useless unless you plan on engaging the services of a cryptographer and a science outfit such as NASA claims to be would know that all too well. That was intentional, as was the release of this report on the day before New Year’s when virtually everyone in the country had their attention on other things. NASA’s Director Griffin says they didn’t deliberately choose this day but I don’t believe them. And, for the record, NASA’s credibility in this matter can be measured in inches out of what should be miles. That’s why his take on this survey’s importance rings very hollow:

He said he had only looked at a few results, but that, “It’s hard for me… to see any data here that the traveling public would care about or ought to care about.” That would be up to others who chose to analyze the data, he said.

If that’s an accurate quote then the Director is fooling himself or trying to fool us. Members of his staff fought for over a year to deny any access to these results on the basis that the public’s trust in the airlines would be damaged if they were released. So, the Director is saying their judgment on the matter can’t be trusted? Oh, but his can?

The most telling opinion reported in this story belongs to one of the professors who helped design the project for NASA, one Jon Krosnick of Stanford:

“The data they released are intentionally designed to prevent people from analyzing the rates properly and are designed to entrap analysts into computing rates that are much higher than the survey really shows,” he said Monday.

My thoughts exactly. This should not be over, not by a longshot. Griffin is playing around, here, and Congress should visit upon him the price of that activity.