Planes, birds and openness

Monday, April 27, 2009 | 2:09 a.m.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood advanced the cause of open government and aviation safety Wednesday when he spoke against a proposal to keep records about airplane collisions with birds a secret.

LaHood said he disagreed with the Federal Aviation Administration’s proposal and predicted, in an interview with The Washington Post, that “you’ll soon be reading about the fact that we’re going to ... make this information as public as anybody wants it.”

The Transportation Department oversees the FAA.

Public concern about these collisions heightened in January after the engines of a US Airways jet were disabled by geese minutes after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in New York. The pilot avoided disaster with a wonderfully skilled landing in the Hudson River.

Reporters immediately sought FAA records about the frequency of bird strikes. USA Today reported that the agency initially refused to release any information, but eventually relented. The Associated Press said that while its request for information was still being processed, the FAA published its secrecy proposal in the Federal Register.

A 30-day period was given for public comment. The results, released this week, ran 5-to-1 against the proposal.

What prompted the agency’s request for secrecy, FAA officials said, was that airlines and airports are under no obligation to report any bird-strike statistics.

The amount of voluntary information they do receive — estimated to be about 20 percent of all incidents — would likely drop considerably if complete openness were required, they said.

For the 20 years in which the FAA has been keeping bird-strike records, it has released only generalized information, such as how many bird strikes were recorded in a year. Its policy has been to withhold specific information, fearing that it could cause affected airlines and airports to be exposed to “unfounded aspersions.”

Without specific information, however, independent studies of where bird strikes are most concentrated are impossible, limiting options for increased safety measures. Our view is that airlines and airports should be required to report all bird-strike incidents, and that all information gathered, specific and otherwise, should be public.