Special Reports

HAS NASA wasted $11.3 million on a flawed survey of airline safety? It looks likely.

The agency commissioned a telephone pollster to ask 29,000 pilots about their near misses, runway collisions and technical problems. At first, the poll seemed to show that these events had previously been alarmingly under-reported. Engine failures, for instance, were cited in NASA's survey at four times the rate recorded in the Federal Aviation Administration's incident records.

The problem is that NASA appears to have counted some incidents more than once. Pilots were given anonymity, so NASA can't tell when several reports of an incident refer to the same event. Explaining the gaffe to the House Committee on Science and Technology on 31 October, NASA chief Mike Griffin admitted the figures were "simply not credible".

Despite this, NASA is being compelled to release the raw data under freedom of information legislation - and will do so next month when references that might identify contributing pilots have been removed, Griffin says.

"They should have thought through the fact that pilots and copilots, for instance, might be reporting the same incidents," says Sheila Bird of the UK's Royal Statistical Society.

NASA claims it commissioned the survey merely to find out if phone polling could improve flight-safety assessment.

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