03:06 pm - Monday
US civil aviation less safe than it seems?
Washington, USA - NASA refuses to publish the results of a survey on safety matters
(WAPA) - After in 1997 a commission of the White House proposed the objective to reduce the fatal accidents in the civil aviation by 80 percent, the NASA, famous US space and aeronautics agency, decided to task the Battelle Memorial Institute a survey among pilots, flight assistants, air traffic controllers and mechanics, in regard to the frequency with which the encountered minor but dangerous threats, as like equipment problems, fires or smoke, passenger disturbances, serious turbulences, collision with birds or insufficient tower communication.
The USD 8,5-millions-project gathered between 2001 and 2005 about 24 thousand interviews, only with pilots, before being prematurely terminated due to the Nasa budget cuts. The collected data were never published, and now the space agency demanded to the institute which produced them to return the information and to erase it from their computers by the end of this month.
The reason for this is given directly by Nasa, through its associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, who declared that the results of the study "Could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey", although the interviews were always conducted with the anonimity guarantee for the pilots as well as for the air-companies.
As it seems, in fact the data of the Nasa-commissioned project report at least twice the impacts with birds, almost mid-air collisions and runway incursions than the one published by the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as numerous episodes of last-minute landing plans changes.
A speaker of the FAA has criticized the methodology of the NASA-project, but the agency defends itself: "It was very scientific". (Avionews)
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Direttore Clara Moschini