A multi-year survey of thousands pilots that was conducted by NASA at a cost of $11 million may never see the full light of day now that a report from the Government Accountability Office has called the survey out of date, Nextgov.com reported. The survey grabbed headlines in late 2007 and early 2008 when NASA refused initially to release any of the results for fear of compromising the confidentiality of respondents. Some of the data was eventually released in a format that made it hard to analyze. The recent GAO report says while the survey was well-designed, it is now too dated to be used for anything other than historical analysis. To do the survey right, NASA would have to reveal more information in the survey about specific aircraft and carriers involved in incidents, the GAO report said.

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As promised, NASA made public the database of results from an $11 million survey of general aviation and commercial pilots. But the agency stripped out large swaths of data, claiming that it needed to do so to protect the anonymity of respondents, USA Today reported. Even data like the aircraft model was replaced with simple size designations. The results were posted on NASA’s Web site and distributed to reporters as PDF files, making them difficult to process with spreadsheet or statistical analysis programs. NASA claimed it did that to keep others from tampering with the data and claiming they were unchanged. In “cleaning” the data, NASA also split all the results into separate tables and randomized the rows of data in each one, making it difficult or impossible to link responses to different questions. That, in turn, makes it difficult to determine if some aviation safety factors had effects on others. The data came from interviews of more than 30,000 pilots, but NASA provided neither any interpretation of the results nor validation of how meaningful the results were. Earlier reports indicated that the survey found higher rates of close calls on the ground and in the air than other statistics compiled separately by the FAA. A former National Transportation Safety Board official said NASA’s move of releasing the data on New Year’s Eve “smacks of arrogance.”

In one of the first flights arranged under a first-of-its-kind agreement, 14 NASA scientists packed onto a Gulfstream V jet owned by Google last week for a 10-hour flight to observe the Quadrantid meteor shower. The team flew over the Arctic and back at about 47,000 feet, using the opportunity to study the shower without light pollution or clouds, Network World’s Layer 8 blog reported. NASA agreed to let Google park its business jets at the federally owned Moffett Field south of San Francisco, a convenient location only a few miles from Google’s headquarters, in return for giving NASA researchers access to those planes. By spending more time tracking how frequently the meteors hit earth’s atmosphere and which directions they travel, scientists hope to be able to calculate where they originated from and to what extent Jupiter’s gravity affects them. The yearly meteor shower starts around Jan. 1 and lasts for about a week.