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back to article NASA denies cover-up on airline safety

NASA has denied covering up its first survey of airline pilots on safety, despite releasing the figures late on New Year's Eve and in pdf format rather than Excel files, making independent number-crunching more difficult. The National Aviation Operational Monitoring Service talked to 8,000 pilots between April 2001 and …

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  1. Torben Mogensen

    Open standards?

    It seems odd in this forum to complain about publication in PDF instead of in Excel. Excel is a closed, undocumented format, where PDF (while not completely open) is at least documented and freely usable.

    If you need the data in a format that allows easy machine-manipulation, ask for documented XML, ASCII or LISP formats. Or if you want to be able to load directly into a spreadsheet, ask for ODF.

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  2. John Macintyre

    hmm, cheap...

    'No product of the NAOMS project, including the survey methodology, the survey responses, and any analysis of the responses, should be viewed or considered at this stage as having been validated'

    $11m for that? Nice, I'll do a survey for that kinda money... 'although the views of around 1000 people were taken into account, this may not amount to 1000 people being spoken to, but may refer to 1000 queries to the same person at different points in time'...

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  3. Mike Street

    Clearly, NASA doesn't believe there is intelligent life on Earth.

    "NASA administrator Michael Griffin said the information was not of any interest to travellers. "

    As a sometime air passenger, I beg to differ. That is the most idiotic comment of the year (so far).

    "Griffin said the agency was not intending to do any more work with the data which was collected to test different methods of gathering data rather than to prove anything about airline safety."

    So, they spent $11m just testing how to do a survey? Must be nice to have so much money and nothing to spend it on.

    Only a couple of days in and the bullshit has started in earnest already.

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  4. Brian Sherwood Jones

    Did Hansen do the analysis?

    http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2536 is on NASA Evasion of Quality Control Procedures.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    Government Rethink Required?

    Let's see - don't scare the public into thinking that air travel is dangerous by covering up this report, but in the mean time, continue scaring the public into thinking that air travel is dangerous by emphasising the terrorist threats, so that we can give everyone a rotten time when they pass through airports.

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  6. Mike Powers

    This is your captain speaking...

    ...we would like to announce that absolutely nothing is wrong, and that there are no problems whatsoever of any kind.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    NASA and Beltway Doublespeak

    Clearly NASA has become another Federal agency that is determined to keep anything that might be considered derogatory to the government buried... The survey as released is $11 million worth of doublespeak and obfuscation.

    Late Night Larry

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    IT Angle

    WTF?

    "NASA has denied covering up its first survey of airline pilots on safety, despite releasing the figures late on New Year's Eve and in pdf format rather than Excel files, making independent number-crunching more difficult."

    Why not just open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat and use the text select tool to copy and paste the text and then paste it into Excel?

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  9. Michael
    Coat

    pilots...

    Oh my God!! Bob, the fuel light!! We're all gonna die!!

    Oh wait, that's the intercom light...

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