One gets the definite impression that members of the House Science & Technology Committee do not want to get rolled again by the National Aeronautics & Space Committee. Consider this revealing passage from the legislators’ 22 October letter to NASA Administrator Michael Griffin:

“(We) ask that you make a copy of all NAOMS [National Aviation System Operational Monitoring Service] data resulting from the pilots survey and in the possession of either NASA or Battelle [who provided contract support for the survey] and deliver it to the Committee in an electronic format. As we wish to insure that an unadulterated record of that data be retained, we request the raw data files that the researchers at Ames are supposed to be working from … (be provided) … no later than 5 p.m. Tuesday, November 6, 2007.”

The subject of this request is for an extensive survey of pilots that NASA refused to release under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the Associated Press (AP), which had requested the material. The survey of some 24,000 pilots, via telephone calls and questionnaires, purportedly indicates that air safety is not as good as generally believed, and as touted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The incidents of bird strikes, runway incursions and near mid-air collisions are about twice what FAA records indicate, according to sources.

The late Lu Zuckerman, a systems design engineer, had some iconoclastic views on measuring air safety. Here is one such diatribe:

“ ‘You would have to catch a commercial airliner every day for 26,000 years to guarantee being involved in a fatal accident. Flying a commercial airliner is nine times safer than driving a car.’