Fly the friendly skies -- if you dare!

Headline in today's San Jose Mercury News:

NASA refuses to disclose survey on air safety

This is the lede:

Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.

NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge the results publicly.

Just last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers.
[Italics mine]

As though extreme discomfort, late and cancelled flights, annoying (and grossly inefficient) "counter-terrorist" baggage limitations and searches weren't enough to discourage me from flying, the notion that there are significant safety concerns that a government agency refuses to disclose -- well, guys, I'd rather hail a passing camel train than fly. (I wonder if the "camel train" crack will get me put on a watch list! Or maybe the word "crack" will.)

The AP sought to obtain the survey data over 14 months under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

"Release of the requested data, which are sensitive and safety-related, could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey," [NASA associate administrator Thomas S.] Luedtke wrote in a final denial letter to the AP.

Again, the italics are mine, and so is sputtering rage.