NASA Releases Cryptic Airline Safety Data

An anonymous reader writes "NASA released part of a controversial study about air traffic safety Monday. The space agency spent $11 million on a survey of airline pilots. Agency officials were so disturbed by the findings that they intended to destroy the information rather than release it. But at an October congressional hearing, NASA administrator Michael Griffin changed tack and said the agency would release its findings. The research shows that safety problems occur far more often than previously recognized. NASA has been criticized however for not providing 'documentation on how to use its data, nor did it provide keys to unlock the cryptic codes used in the dataset.'"

NASA's mission

[Butisol]

NASA lost 2 of their 5 space-worthy shuttles. Are these really the people we should be listening to about safety?

blame the media

[Anonymous Coward]

I think our retarded media has more to do with government secrecy then any conspiracy. I'm a pilot. None of this data is surprising, unexpected, or really, in any way new. However, the retards at fox news and CNN will spin this to sell add space instead of to show how safe aviation really is. As in ... Oh my GOD!!!! the airplanes were 4.8 miles apart instead of 5 miles. Panic!!!!!

Ask any pilot, more regulations != not safer

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming the actual non-cryptic survey is eventually released: The number to focus on is the rate of actual crashes. Unless this survey reveals a RECENT change for the worse, I would hate to see the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) take action. After all, if a similar driving survey was taken, I believe that many of us would have one "almost crash" nearly every time we go out on the road: Flying is by far the safest way to travel and nothing has changed.

Re:NASA's mission

[xSauronx]

Nah, theyre the people we should be listening to when they say something lacks it: they clearly have experience in that area.

Re:NASA's mission

[bitrex]

Richard Fenyman's report on the Challenger disaster stated that shuttle engineers on average believed that a catastrophic vehicle loss would occur once for every 100 flights - as they're on STS 127 now the Space Shuttle program is doing approximately par for the course. Space flight is orders of magnitude more risky than air transport, and while both disasters were caused by engineering flaws in the end it seems unfair to make such an apples to oranges comparison and say that NASA knows nothing about safety. Perhaps their management knows little about safety (they wildly overestimated the shuttle's reliability to the media, after all), but given the complexities involved it seems a miracle of engineering safety and otherwise that anyone comes back alive at all.

I am an airline Pilot

[occasional user]

Back in the day (60s) NASA did a lot of safety work and one of the things that came out of it was the scientific analysis of fatigue. The whole set of transportation rules (trucks, trains, airplane) that deal with fatigue, such as limits on duty days came from this. They identified short and long-term fatigue. Now your airline pilot is certain to be safe from a fatigue standpoint, but your surgeon might be on his 49t hour awake, but that's for another discussion. Next they determined that pilots are so in fear of getting in trouble that they keep information about mistakes to themselves. "Hey!" someone wondered. Let's take this and use it as an incentive. So they came up with a program where if you screwed up, if you told them about what happened and your recommendation to keep it from happening again, they would give you immunity from getting in trouble. A flood of these reports started coming in (like the one from the previous poster yahoo who busted airspace and blames it on a controller). Now these are anonymous. The form that comes back is a receipt with your identifying info taken off of it. But...it's not hard to tell that an Airbus 319 heading from Denver to Chicago at 9:00 at night on November 30th belongs to...Frontier Airlines. And then the pilots can be identified through their flight time...and that's about as appealing to pilots as posting their medical records on line. The rabble-rousing reporters don't understand the program, the benefits or the rationale behind it. Publishing the data isn't going to make our airspace safer, it's going to ensure a drop in participation (I don't want to see my name in the headlines...especially if I am in an accident and an investigative reporter data mines the records to find the NASA reports I made, don't think it won't happen). Most of the reports are for altitude busts (you get in trouble if you cause a "deal", or a loss of separation with another airplane), mistakenly crossing a runway when not authorized or for getting your paperwork screwed up. Interestingly, one of the first articles to come out from this debate was about a flight crew who fell asleep on the way to Denver and reported it to NASA. No, they didn't get in trouble, but a reporter figured out that it was a Frontier flight (that's why I used the example) and it's no secret who was assigned to that flight, any Frontier employee could look up the records on the computer. Do you think those guys are going to ever file a report again? Both NASA and the NTSB do a good job making recommendations. The airlines and their hand-puppet, the FAA do a very good job of ignoring them.

Re:Not Your Job

[CodeBuster]

Fortunately, since it was public knowledge that NASA was conducting the study, it was more difficult for certain factions within NASA or low-level political appointees to pull a Philip Cooney [wikipedia.org] style "editing" of the results and conclusions. The truth must be told, no matter how bad it is or how much it hurts the airlines. Failure to release the full report because the average American might "draw the wrong conclusions" or become scared or "lose confidence" in the airlines is NOT an acceptable excuse to edit, quash, or destroy the report. The people have a right to know what risks they are taking when they fly, particularly when their tax dollars paid for the formal analysis of those risks by qualified scientists and other experts.

Re:TCAS Stats

[xquark]

There are 3 phases to flight, ascent cruise and descent, from what I understand most of the silent events occur
during the take-off and landing stages in both cases the secondary systems have to kick-in because either the
pilot was pulling up too fast and as a result would have hit the tail on runway for take-off, or they were landing
with an awkward angle.

In both cases the system automatically kicks in and "attempts" to rectify the situation. The trouble is there is a
calculation it does relating to a "projected" state of the aircraft and what kind of counter maneuvers have to be
executed in order to get out of that state.

If it decides the number or the sensitivity of the maneuvers is beyond what a human can do within the necessary
time span it kicks-in and helps out - that fact is recorded on the CMU and on the blackbox most often than not its
ignored by the FAA and the airlines. for the most part the bells and whistles occur when there is a possibility of
a mid-air collision or if the aircraft is descending at a rate that not considered safe.

As for cruise, when considering a 747 traveling in bad weather with flaky radar at about 850km/hr the distance traveled
in 10secs is roughly 2.3km, in that 10seconds the pilots may be required to execute a series of very complex maneuvers,
the unfortunate situation is when someone with years of experience freezes or makes the wrong decisions under pressure/stress,
such human weaknesses make these systems a necessity.

The point I wanted to make was that the TCAS data collected both in the US and Europe are not being used to better
train/filter-out pilots.

Re:NASA's mission

[Marcos Eliziario]

That has to be the stupidest comment I've ever posted to Slashdot... and I get a "5, Insightful." WTF?

Once I've posted a comment that said:
"Mod me insightful, please"
And mind what? got an instant 5+ insightful.

Re:NASA's mission

[giorgist]

In Engineering you never fire an Engineer that lived through a disaster that is his mistake. They just lesson cost them 1 billion dollars. You don't fire somebody after having lived through that lesson. He/She is gold. Making mistakes or living through exceptional disasters are invaluable. You do fire somebody if they repeat mistakes. G

Re:Oh no!

[JackMeyhoff]

You trust software developers who cannot handle even checking null pointers to fly your plane? I sure don't from my experience in the software industry. I get nervous when I fly high tech, I am more and more a analogue kinda guy rather than techie nowdays for good reason.

Re:wow, pretty tough words. Are you responsible

[CFD339]

Why is it that you can't see a difference between internally investigating and correcting something as a routine review process and publicly declaring an entire industry to be rife with major safety issues and destined for disaster?

Clearly they are two different things.