NASA Faces House Hearings on Air Safety

Source: New York Times

By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: October 23, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 — A House committee said Monday that it would hold hearings into why the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is withholding 24,000 responses by pilots for airlines and other companies to a government-sponsored safety survey.

The panel asked the agency to hand over an electronic copy of the data to ensure that it would not be destroyed.

The committee and the agency are arguing over a telephone survey of about 8,000 pilots, conducted repeatedly over several months in an effort to track safety problems and determine if they were worsening. The survey was recommended in 1997 by a White House panel on aviation safety. The interviews were completed in early 2005.

The questionnaires ask about bird strikes, near misses in the air and on runways, last-second changes in landing instructions from air traffic controllers and other problems.

Two people involved in the data gathering, who would speak only if they were not identified publicly because they had been ordered by NASA not to discuss the findings, said the answers indicated the Federal Aviation Administration had underestimated the rate of safety-related events....

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/washington/23plane.html

until they make the report public.

And no you can't use the confiscated funds to cover the debt. (You already had that chance.)

NASA is not responsible. Some political appointee is responsible and cutting that organisation's throat would suit the current regime's agenda perfectly.

Learn to think or bugger off to FR where you don't have to.

I think Nasa NOT reporting the results was probably the smarter thing to do. And not because it protects the airlines. It bolsters curiousity to sit on the results, now they have to give a public statement before a body that can't censor the report to say exactly what is in it. The bigger a spotlight they can put on the airline flaws the better.