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What NASA Won't Tell You About Air Safety
rabble writes "According to a report out of Washington, NASA wants to avoid telling you about how unsafe you are when you fly. According to the article, when an $8.5M safety study of about 24,000 pilots indicated an alarming number of near collisions and runway incidents, NASA refused to release the results. The article quotes one congressman as saying 'There is a faint odor about it all.' A friend of mine who is a general aviation pilot responded to the article by saying 'It's scary but no surprise to those of us who fly.'"
NASA keeps a voluntary database of incidents/accidents and safety concerns from pilots. The idea is that it can be totally anonymous. They want pilots to feel free to report safety concerns without fear of being fired or discriminated against by their current airline. The database is fully on-line and you can search it. Look at the facts: The American airline industry completes thousands of flights every day without a single issue. That is friggen AMAZING! The ATC has a very hard job, and they do it well. A big part of why things are so safe is the over-zealous approach pilots (most pilots) take to safety. There are several different ways to report problems. If you are at a major airport and break the rules (in a small plane for example) you can usually expect an FAA inspector to meet you at the tarmac to pull your ticket on the spot. If you don't take safety seriously word gets around fast. Your fellow pilots don't appreciate it.
http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
This program has been going for years and years. It helps make the skies above you safer. If there is an increase it is likely due to one of the major trends affecting aviation today. Fewer airports, more airplanes with smaller passenger sizes, more flights, younger pilots, etc. I highly doubt NASA is trying to deep-six some scary fact, they probably just didn't want to pay to deal with the fallout from a service that costs them dollars. They do it for free in the interest of safety. They should be applauded for their years of service to the aviation industry.
Keep in mind that the ASRS is in ADDITION to the NTSB and FAA programs for saftey (which also has searchable online-database).
There is really no need for this alarmism.
I am a general aviation pilot with about 800 hours and nothing you saw is the slightest bit out of the ordinary. The "3-5 miles" is the lateral separation for two aircraft in cruise flight at the same altitude. As long as you're separated vertically by at least 1,000' (which the first aircraft pic clearly was - probably 3000' above you, in fact), there is no lateral separation requirement at all. Many times, I'll fly directly under or over a commercial jet, which is fine since the controller knows we're at different altitudes.
Your second picture pretty clearly shows you on approach to an airport - SLC. Salt Lake City has parallel runways (see http://www.airnav.com/airport/SLC) and under certain conditions, to improve airport capacity, simultaneous parallel approaches are allowed. That is, two aircraft simultaneously landing on parallel runways. This is perfectly safe because the aircraft aren't just randomly cruising around; they're being held to extremely tight lateral guidance by the runways' Instrument Landing Systems (ILS) so they don't conflict.
And, finally, at any time, during any phase of flight -- as long as you're not in a cloud -- a controller can always have the following conversation with a pilot:
ATC: You have traffic, 11 o'clock, 4 miles, 8,000 feet, moving northbound. Report him in sight.
Pilot: Traffic in sight.
ATC: Roger, maintain visual separation with that traffic.
Now the two airplanes can get closer than the 5 mile limit; the pilot has reported the other airplane is in sight and is doing "see and avoid" -- basically, the same way you avoid hitting other cars when you're driving.
I hope this has been informative enough for you to, please, stop posting alarmist blog entries saying "Oh my god, look at that plane, it's way too close!" Really, these are all quite normal operations.
I believe the limit is usually 3 miles horizontally OR 1,000 feet vertically, presumably because a pressure-based altimeter is less prone to failure than an electronic lateral navigation system.
The airliner in that picture on your blog is not violating any recommended practices. The 3-5 miles is typical following distance for airliners on the same path, which allows time for potentially dangerous wake turbulence to dissipate. For planes whose paths do not intersect (in the 3-D environment, not merely 2-D), much, much closer passes can safely occur. The plane you show was at least 1000 feet higher than your own, a standard separation for planes awaiting landing clearance, and not on the same flight path.
Whatever may be in NASA's report (I suspect it's mostly the collisions it refers to are mostly taxiway and tarmac incidents), does not change the fact that the airlines are still the safest way to travel by a large margin. Over the past 20 years, your odds of dying in a commerical airline accident were about 1 in 5 million per flight (multiply by number of flights you take in life for net risk). Your odds of dying on the road are about 1 in 50 (net risk).
George Deutch is his name, here is a brief comment on his resignation.
The report will not protect you from deliberate violations of the rules, but if you accidentally or due to the safety issue involved had to break a rule, it will limit FAA's ability to punish you. As I recall, if there is an accident involved (defined by FAA terms), it's also not usable. You can use this protection once in five years, I think, but I'm not certain of the dates. (I've filed reports but never needed the protection.)
The identifying data is removed from the report before it goes into the database. The pilot gets a reciept with a number and date so he can invoke the protections.
You are spot on about feeling comfortable doing the reporting.
The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying, however, is about equal.
Even assuming this to be true (which, not having looked at the analysis, I reserve judgement on), if I'm planning a trip from A to B that are, say, 20 hours driving time or 2 hours flying time apart, flying is going to be 10 times safer for me than driving.
-- Alastair