Air Safety Survey: NASA's Sluggishness Made Things Worse Than They Needed To Be
NASA Gives Glimpse of Air Safety Survey, AP
“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.”
Editor’s note: Aw c’mon, Mike. Your staff punted again and again on this until it spilled into the holidays. On 31 October 2007 you testified before Congress that NASA would release the data. Yet it took you more than 2 weeks to issue the memo that would convene the panel that would look at how this could be done. Had you issued that memo on the same day that you appeared before Congress this data could have been released before the holidays. Indeed, had NASA moved to comply with publicly stated interest of Congress – concerns voiced weeks earlier (in October), this information could have been released even sooner. Instead, NASA tried to stall and kick the can down the road – issuing nonsensical comments such as Thomas Luedtke’s FOIA resonse to AP:
NASA Sits on Air Safety Survey, AP
“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,” Luedtke wrote in a final [FOIA] denial letter to the AP.
