FAA: "You can't handle the truth!"

[thewayne]

Every day I eat my breakfast 200 yards from a pelican who'd like nothing better than to put its beak through my brain!


Sorry, been a little ill of late and my brain is always weird. And when you're weird, who better to channel than Jack?!


Anyway, after that flight went down in NYC from birds taking out its engines, the FAA said it was going to release bird strike data. Now they're saying they won't. They say: ""The complexity of the information warrants care with its interpretation; releasing this information without benefit of proper analysis would not only produce an inaccurate perception of the individual airports and airlines but also inaccurate and inappropriate comparisons between airports/airlines," the FAA wrote March 19 in the Federal Register."

Well, I have to agree with them, at least partially. It would be easy for a layperson to misinterpret the data and draw some pretty stupid conclusions. But there's also an awful lot of aviation engineers and wildlife management specialists who would love to see these data sets who would otherwise absolutely love to see this data.

But here's the scary part: "The number of strikes annually reported more than quadrupled from 1,759 in 1990 to a record 7,666 in 2007."

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/03/faa-says-public.html

Comments

[silveradept]

So more planes in the air makes for more bird strikes. And I think lots of people would like to see that data - too bad that fear of being misinterpreted is keeping this away. We've been misinterpreting just about everything statistical for years now - why stop now?

[slashophile.livejournal.com]

So should we be afraid of birds?