NASA releases airline safety report

WASHINGTON, Jan. 1 (UPI) -- NASA has released the results of a $11.5 million study of airline safety, but critics say the report is difficult for outsiders to analyze.

The research by the U.S. space agency collected the experiences of 24,000 pilots of near-hits and other air safety incidents, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said his agency had no plans to do additional work with the material.

"It's hard for me to see any data here that the traveling public would care about or ought to care about," he said in a conference call with reporters. "But it's also not for me to prescribe what others may care about. We were asked to release the data and I said that we would, and I've done that."

The survey data did not link pilots' reports to the type of plane the pilot flew or their experience level, the newspaper reported.

Chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., said the thousands of pages of "redacted" and "disaggregated" data put on the Internet on Monday was "a start but not a satisfactory start."

The survey, called the National Aviation Operations Monitoring System, was aimed at uncovering safety problems by surveying pilots, rather than waiting for them to make anonymous reports, or gathering information from "black boxes" or similar sources.