GAO to Assess NASA Aviation Safety Data

Air Safety Week, Feb 11, 2008

The U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology has asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to analyze massive amounts of data on U.S. air safety that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) made public late last year.

NASA acquired the data as part of the National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service (NAOMS) pilot survey---collected at taxpayer expense---on the safety of U.S. air travel. But NASA officials have repeatedly said that they have no intention of assessing the data.

The panel requests that the GAO promptly provide the committee with an appropriate analysis of this data. The lawmakers said calculations could provide insight into the accuracy of FAA data reporting systems, the accuracy of the NAOMS survey itself and may point to important safety issues that would require further study.

"When the public pays for five years of government work designed to help us improve flying safety, I think the public deserves to get a report back on what was learned. NASA won't do the work, so I am asking the GAO to bring back some answers to the committee that we can then share with the country," said Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), the committee chairman.

After being criticized for its handling of the release of the aviation safety data on Dec. 31, NASA updated its NAOMS website to add a Microsoft Office Excel formatted version of previously posted files containing pilot survey responses.

NASA had posted the survey responses Dec. 31, in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, the U.S. space agency's standard for dissemination of information to the public. After requests for the data in Excel format, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin made an exception to the agency's usual practice.

The initial heavily redacted data and all subsequent data will be published in both Excel and PDF formats on the NASA website.

Re-release of initial data from the $11 million NAOMS project in Excel format should make it easier for researchers to mine the report's findings based on interviews with 30,000 commercial and general aviation pilots. NASA has asked the National Academies of Science to independently evaluate the NAOMS study.

Under congressional pressure, NASA dumped more than 16,000 pages of raw, hard-to-interpret data at the end of last year. NASA had initially denied requests to release the report, saying it "could materially affect the public confidence in and the commercial welfare of the air carriers."

Committee Members called NASA's refusal "troubling and unconvincing" and urged the agency to make the data available to the public.

Griffin said NASA erred in its reasoning for originally withholding the data from the public. He also disputes the value of the data since the study "was not properly organized, not properly peer reviewed."

Griffin told reporters in a conference call that NASA has no plans to study the data, saying that is a job for others. He insisted that the NAOMS project simply involved development of aviation safety data collection processes. "The value of the data needs to be determined by the larger aviation community with an operational interest in aviation safety," he stated.

But Griffin also said: "it's hard for me to see any data here that the traveling public would care about, or ought to care about, and it's not for me to prescribe what others ought to care about."

The House panel said "as originally conceived, NAOMS would have provided a unique source of air safety information, which integrated continuous survey data from pilots, ground controllers, ground crews and cabin crew to create a complete picture of what is happening in the air safety system nationally.

"This information would not be driven by adverse events and would have a statistical rigor that the self-reporting anecdotal systems lack. As a result, safety experts could mine the data for insights into new safety threats as they emerge, the lawmakers believe.

Meantime, NASA has further refined the NAOMS website to include additional air carrier and rotorcraft survey responses, several NAOMS project presentations, the Aviation System Monitoring and Modeling Sub-Project Plan and an updated radaction summary.

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