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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.'"
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/proposed_classified_bill_will
Rep. John Haller (R-PA) introduces a bill that will allocate (classified) dollars over the next (classified) years to fight flesh-eating (classified).
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!!!!!
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
I am one of those anonymous pilots who has filed a NASA ASRA report. My report was not of coming close to hitting another aircraft. It was because of a violation of airspace (NASA's own Moffett Field) as a result of Air Traffic Controller mis-communication/hand off. While the pilot is ultimately responsible for communicating with ATC. This program was designed to be anonymous. It provided pilots with a way to discuss issues without having to be identified. This was designed to improve safety. I completely agree with this idea as it frees the pilot from having to come to call for reporting things that could be potentially hazardous or failures within the system. Unfortunately today, lawyers are always searching out new ways to prove negligence. Protecting pilots trying to help is even more important! In the aviation community, there is very little true negligence. Many husbands/spouses of pilots killed sue people after the pilot flew into a mountainside. Why? Because nobody knows why, and there could be many defendants (Airframe, engine, altimeter, radio navigation, radio communication, transponder, ATC (FAA/Government), Spark Plug manger, carberator, etc). Yes, they sue them all because if the jury thinks that any one person might possibly be responsible, it's millions. It's cheaper and/or a safer bet to sue than to buy life insurance it seems these days. I wouldn't mind if they released categoried data, ie, Phase: LANDING, Situation: NEAR MISS, Key 1: Distance, Value 1: 1500ft, etc... IE, you just say what happened, and nothing more. This is what the government really needs. I haven't reviewed all of the data, but, this is very reasonable in the light of trying to determine what is going wrong.
-- you can't tell who, what, or when the incident occurred.
That's part of the point. The data collection is ANONYMOUS. The goal is that pilots will report MORE if they know that their voluntary reporting of incidents that don't require FAA reports will stay anonymous. Stuff happens up there. Sometimes it's bad stuff that's nobody's fault. But a pilot is far more likely to call attention to a potentially bad situation that's nobody's fault if he knows that it won't come back and bite him.
If you add the exact time and coordinates of every incident it wouldn't be hard to back-track and put names with each one. There are VERY detailed FAA records of who flew every flight leg in the country over the last few years. It's not hard to back-up anonymous data if you leave too many variables that can be referenced with outside data -- see what happened to Netflix/IMBD.
If it takes anonymity to get better data, then let's get better data. I'd much rather have more anonymous pilots reporting close calls truthfully than have fewer pilots reporting data and trying to put a positive spin on it. You can make as many laws as you want requiring disclosure, but every single pilot in the known universe will always put a positive spin on things if he knows that his job (and his family) are on the line.
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.
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.
That has to be the stupidest comment I've ever posted to Slashdot... and I get a "5, Insightful." WTF?
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
The exact reason for the 5 mile radius has to do with the errors associated with radar and how far a plane can travel in the time it takes for the radar sweep to update. It's generally 3 mile radius/1000ft vertical near airports, 5 mile radius/1000ft vertical away from airports up to flight level 290, then 5 mile radius/2000ft vertical above that.
but yes, you're correct, it's generally a system that 'fails well'.
Name...That...Autocomplete!