By Rita Beamish Staff Writer

Article Launched: 12/31/2007 10:47:40 PM PST

NASA grudgingly released some results Monday from an $11.3 million federal air-safety study it previously withheld from the public over concerns it would upset travelers and hurt airline profits.

But it published the findings in a format that made it cumbersome for any thorough analysis by outsiders.

"Even a rocket scientist would be unable to decipher the redacted gibberish NASA chose to release," said Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-El Segundo, whose district includes Los Angeles International Airport.

"Every day, millions of flying passengers are being placed at high risk of a catastrophic airline collision," Lieu said. "NASA must fulfill its moral duty by immediately releasing all the survey results in a manner understandable to the public."

Released on New Year's Eve, the unprecedented research conducted over nearly four years relates to safety problems identified by some 29,000 pilots interviewed by telephone.

Earlier characterizations from people who have seen the results said they would show that events like near-collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than previously recognized. Such information could not be gleaned from the 16,208 pages posted by NASA on its Web site, however, because of the way it was presented. The data was based on interviews with about 8,000 pilots per year from 2001 until the end of 2004.

The NASA Web site shows formatted, printed reports that the space agency scrubbed to ensure none of the pilots who were interviewed and promised anonymity could potentially be identified. The data was posted as NASA officials began a telephone news conference, allowing reporters no time to look at the material and ask them questions about it.

NASA also did not provide documentation on how to use its data, nor did it provide keys to unlock the cryptic codes used in the data set.

"Releasing raw data without any assessments is like producing a recipe without instructions on how to mix the ingredients and how long to cook them," said Rep. Jane Harman, D-El Segundo, whose district includes a small portion of LAX.

"In this form, the NASA survey is close to useless for policymakers who want to make certain busy airports like LAX are safe," Harman said. "I fear someone may be exercising a heavy political hand over material that is supposed to provide technical guidance to the FAA and airports on how to improve safety for the flying public."

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told reporters the agency typically releases information in Adobe System's portable document format, known as pdf, which presents the information on formatted, printed pages. But there are dozens of reports available from NASA's Web site about other subjects in Microsoft's Excel data format, which would permit researchers to conduct a meaningful analysis more easily.

Griffin said NASA wanted to ensure that no one modified the survey results and circulated false data as NASA's research product. He said even inexpensive optical character recognition software could convert the formatted reports. Such software can risk introducing errors in the data as it performs these conversions.

"We've gone the extra mile with this data, and well beyond our original intentions," Griffin said.

He dismissed suggestions that NASA chose to release the data late on New Year's Eve, when the public is distracted by holidays and news organizations are thinly staffed.

"We didn't deliberately choose to release on the slowest news day of the year," Griffin said.

NASA drew harsh criticism from Congress and news organizations for keeping the information secret. Rejecting an Associated Press request under the Freedom of Information Act, NASA explained that it did not want to undermine public confidence in the airlines or hurt airline fortunes.

Griffin later overruled his staff and promised Congress that he would release at least some data by the end of the year.

NASA's survey, the National Aviation Operations Monitoring System, was launched to see if a massive pilot survey would help pinpoint problems and prevent accidents. Survey planners said it was unique because it was a random survey, with an 80 percent response rate, that did not rely on pilots to take the initiative to report problems but rather reached out and interviewed them.

Griffin said NASA never intended to analyze the data it collected, but rather the agency planned to pass on its methodology to the aviation community.

He said he had only looked at a few results, but that, "It's hard for me to see any data here that the traveling public would care about or ought to care about." That would be up to others who chose to analyze the data, he said.

Pilots were asked how many times they encountered safety incidents in flight and on the ground, such as near-collisions, equipment failure, runway interference, trouble communicating with the tower and unruly passengers.

Federal Aviation Administration officials on Monday said they had not yet reviewed NASA's findings, but noted that NASA's methods in collecting the data were vastly different.

Runway incursions are typically reported by controllers and supervisors working in the control tower, while midair close calls between planes are reported by the pilots to the FAA, according to Ian Gregor, an FAA spokesman.

"We are very diligent about logging every safety event at airports and we think that our empirical data, as opposed to subjective data in the NASA report, is a good indicator of what's going on in the nation's skies," Gregor said.

Griffin outraged some NASA employees by saying the project had been poorly managed and its methodology not properly vetted. Survey experts who worked on it, however, said they used state-

of-the-art industry techniques and carefully validated the results.

NASA's handling of the matter prompted a congressional investigation and separate investigations by its inspector general and by a union representing NASA workers.

Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who helped design the project for NASA, said the released data was inadequate and "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."

The Air Transport Association of America, an organization representing major airlines, responded to the NASA release with a statement praising U.S. skies as the safest in the world and said NASA's study "was not designed to capture real-time, verifiable data" and that FAA reports are more meaningful.

Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, urged NASA to finish reviewing the data for further release as soon as possible.

Staff Writer Art Marroquin contributed to this article.