NASA Releases Pilot Gripes on Tired Crews, Air Traffic

Bowing to pressure from Congress, NASA has grudgingly released thousand of pages of pilot complaints, CNN reports. They include complaints about crowded skies, tired crews, and communication problems. The surveys of more than 30,000 pilots found twice as many collisions with bird, near-collisions with other aircraft, and runway incursions as the government's monitoring system had reported.

The head of NASA stressed that the raw survey data should not be considered validated and that air travel remains extremely safe. "What the public should understand is that they have approximately the same risk from dying from a lightning strike as they do from dying in an air transport accident in the US," Michael Griffin said. (More NASA stories.)