1984 - More Misinformation From Bush Administration

The blogosphere fired up the pressure when it was first learned NASA was withholding the study showing just how unsafe the air space really is, the Bushies appeared to cave and promised to do the right thing. But alas, the lying liars that they are, they did?a data dump the last day of the year, after purposely scrambling the data to make it unusable.

NASA Gives Glimpse of Air Safety Survey

The results from commercial pilots appeared to reflect in part at least 1,266 incidents in which aircraft flew within 500 feet of each other, generally considered a near miss; at least 1,312 cases where pilots suddenly dropped or climbed inadvertently more than 300 feet in flight; and 166 reports of pilots landing without clearance at an airport with an active control tower. The Associated Press matched the data to the questionnaire that was used to interview pilots and was obtained separately by the AP.

The data also reflected 513 reports of hard landings and 4,267 cases of aircraft hitting birds.

Because NASA scrambled the data, it was impossible to determine whether multiple pilots might be reporting the same incidents, and a key expert said the numbers appeared inflated. NASA also did not present the data so researchers could project survey results to overall safety trends.

The data that NASA released was "intentionally designed to prevent people from analyzing the rates properly and are designed to entrap analysts into computing rates that are much higher than the survey really shows," said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor and survey expert who helped design the project for NASA. He urged NASA to release more of the data needed for a better analysis.