Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Reporters looking for a sensational story wouldn't hesitate a moment to put up banner headlines screaming about near misses if there's any chance the data can be taken out of context. 1,000 feet of seperation is perfectly safe for planes flying in different directions as long as the 1,000 feet is vertical and not horizontal. I just got home from driving on the interstate where it was a LOT scarier and dangerous to be tailgated at 75 mph by a huge pickup truck. But the hick in the thing would respond probably positively to a congresscritter calling for more regulations and whatnot because planes were missing each other by ONLY 1,000 FEET AT 500 MPH!! OMG!!
As for the data, I thought it would be easy to import into a database but the dang files are not only PDF, there are several datasets in each giant PDF with column headers (titles) every page. They need to be broken apart into distinct tables' worth of data each and all the extra headers stripped. What a pain. I'll think about it.
a-fucking-men. Slashdot geeks: We'll leave the computers to you, you leave the flying to pilots, eh?
Dickheads. You're no better then the "soccer moms" you always go on about. So smug you know a bit about technology. But fucking useless outside of your field of expertise.