

Pressure applied by Congress forced NASA to turn over the report









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RE: Yet it's still safer to fly.
By Gibby82 on 1/2/2008 3:22:43 AM , Rating: 2
The only thing you need to worry about is the near misses.

Bird strikes, hard landings, and pilots sleeping (there are two, so imagine on falling asleep isn't uncommon) aren't that big of a deal.

Now as for the near misses, this is almost more on the ATC end than pilots. As I understand it, ATC tell them where they are cleared to fly, notifies them of any course changes needed, and basically controls the sky. The other contributing factor would be malfunctioning equipment.

Now, the real question for all of this is how many flight are there per year in the US? I would imagine it might put these numbers into better perspective.

RE: Yet it's still safer to fly.
By Gibby82 on 1/2/2008 3:24:28 AM , Rating: 2
*one* falling asleep

By Alexstarfire on 1/2/2008 3:45:26 AM , Rating: 2
I wouldn't really think so. Granted I don't know where these "near misses" took place, but I'd bet that 99% of them were at or in the vicinity of the airport where it was taking off/landing. If all these near misses occurred out in the middle of nowhere then we'd have something to be worried about. Even then, I haven't heard of two commercial planes colliding on accident. Have you?

RE: Yet it's still safer to fly.
By Fritzr on 1/2/2008 4:03:19 AM , Rating: 6
I think the Canary Island accident involving 2 fully loaded Boeing 747s was due to pilot error. Pilot was told by ATC to hold for clearance. Pilot then immediately took off and did not have enough speed to hop over the obstacle on the runway (2d 747)

A small plane took out a larger jet in South America last year. The blackbox ratted out the pilots. They were busy joking around at a time flight rules required they be paying attention to what they were doing.

Bird strikes are relatively unavoidable. Hard landings due to poor maintenance/pilot error are accidents the aircraft survived. Just because the news media ignore accidents that don't seriously damage the aircraft and/or passengers does not mean they don't point to causes that can seriously damage the aircraft or it's contents.

If NASA did include a Privacy Statement in their survey, then they did the correct thing by sanitizing the data before release. If they actually expect people to believe that they never intended to analyze the data, then I would think those administrators should be removed for terminal stupidity. A data gathering test's results can only be validated by analyzing the data gathered and finding that the result meets the requirements.

As far as releasing the analysis they did to validate the procedure, you can be sure they got a lot of pressure from FAA and related bureaucrats to make sure the results got buried deep if it showed real safety concerns being ignored by them. After all this report was merely to test a data gathering protocol, so the results are of course meaningless :D

RE: Yet it's still safer to fly.
By TomZ on 1/2/2008 8:36:10 AM , Rating: 2

Regarding bird strikes, you're wrong about that:
Myth - Bird strikes cannot cause serious airline accidents.

More at:

I don't know about hard landings, but I'd guess those place additional undesired stress on the aircraft that could lead to safety concerns immediately or later on.

Regarding sleeping pilots, if it were perfectly safe to have only one pilot, then there wouldn't be rules that require two pilots, would there? No, pilots are paid professionals earning more money than most of us, the least they can do is stay awake on the job.

By KristopherKubicki (blog) on 1/2/2008 12:28:04 PM , Rating: 2
Bird strikes on engines are typically not fatal. All aircraft engines must be certified to intake a fairly large chunk of flesh (I think they use pig corpses for the testing.)

My mom works for the industry, and I've seen some pretty grisly pictures of what happens when a 300mph plane hits a large bird. There isn't much left of the bird, and the remains will definitely chew up a fuselage.

