Report Finds Deep Flaws in Aborted NASA Pilot Survey

A NASA-funded survey of

 commercial pilots was so flawed

 that the results should not be used to assess the safety

 of the nation’s air travel system, according to a National Research Council review of the U.S. space agency’s National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service (NAOMS) project

. Between 2001 and the end of 2004, NAOMS contractors surveyed 29,000 pilots in an effort

 to statistically track rates of safety-related incidents in the nation’s airspace system and detect trends in those rates over time. In 2005, NASA handed off the survey to the Air Line Pilots Association, which discontinued the telephone survey in favor of less expensive Internet surveys.