Thursday, November 05, 2009
Pilot survey yields unreliable data: report
The National Research Council on Oct. 28 released a report showing design deficiencies in a survey intended to track safety-related aviation incidents make the data gathered unreliable.
The National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service survey, which was jointly managed by NASA and the Aberdeen, MD-based Battelle Memorial Institute, was administered to more than 29,000 air carrier and general aviation pilots from April 2001 through December 2004.
According to an Oct. 28 NRC press release, although the survey employed a number of generally accepted collection practices, several flaws in its design and implementation affected the usefulness of the data. Among the many criticisms, NRC said pilots who answered questions regarding numbers of hours and flights flown and numbers of incidents observed rounded numbers or reported convenient numbers (numbers ending in 0 or 5), which NRC said contributed to serious concerns regarding the data's accuracy and reliability.