Too close for comfort; NASA, admitting its secrecy was a mistake, to reveal survey's findings of an alarming rate of near-collisions at and above airports

WASHINGTON - Abandoning its secrecy claims, NASA promised Congress yesterday that it will reveal the results of an unprecedented federal aviation survey finding that aircraft near-collisions, runway interference and other safety problems occur far more often than previously recognized.

Provoking broad criticism, NASA had said previously that it was withholding the information because it feared upsetting air travelers and hurting airline profits. NASA cited those reasons in refusing to turn over the survey data to The Associated Press, which sought the information over 14 months under the Freedom of Information Act.

"We did say that, and that was the wrong thing to have said," NASA's administrator, Michael Griffin, testified during an oversight hearing. "I apologize. ... People make mistakes. This was a mistake."

Lawmakers from both sides were harshly critical. Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, said NASA's reasons for withholding the research were "both troubling and unconvincing."

Said Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the top Republican on the committee's oversight and investigations panel: "This appears to be a mess of NASA's own causing. You've dug yourself in a hole. I can't say you're not digging yourself deeper from what I've heard at this hearing."

Griffin said he has directed release "as soon as possible" of all the research data that do not contain what he described as confidential commercial information. He said NASA spent $11.3 million on the research.

"The survey results we can legally release will be released, period," he said.

Griffin said NASA may release portions of the research data before the end of the year, after it spends time scrubbing the data to ensure that none of the roughly 24,000 pilots who were interviewed anonymously by telephone could be identified.

That wasn't fast enough for some lawmakers. "Shouldn't it be a priority to your agency to scrub this and get this out to the public immediately?" asked Rep. Jerry Costello (D-Ill.).

He said NASA "made a huge mistake in how they responded to the AP and to the media."

Another lawmaker, Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.), asked: "Why does it take a hearing in Congress and public pressure for a hearing to get this information made public?"

In an odd twist, Griffin raised doubts about the reliability of his own agency's research by telling lawmakers that NASA does not consider the survey's methodology or data to have been sufficiently verified.

Griffin confirmed NASA's research project showed many kinds of safety incidents occurring more frequently than were reported by other U.S. government monitoring programs. But he cautioned that the data were never validated and warned, "There may be reason to question the validity of the methodology."