Assails ‘Cooking of Statistics’ : Nader Says FAA Did Not Report 102 Near-Misses

At least 102 aircraft near-misses went unreported to the public in 1983 and 1984 as the result of the Federal Aviation Administration’s “cooking of statistics,” consumer advocate Ralph Nader charged Friday.

Nader’s Aviation Consumer Action Project said that documents it had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from three of the FAA’s nine reporting regions--the western Pacific, Southwest and South--revealed that the agency classified about 20% of 566 near collisions in those years as “unconfirmed” or listed them in a category called “operational errors.”

Only about a fifth of the incidents cited by the project involved regularly scheduled commercial jetliners. Most involved general aviation or military aircraft.

Engen Report Cited

Nader’s release of the documents at a news conference came after FAA chief Donald D. Engen made public a report earlier this week that concluded “near midair collisions have decreased by 50% over the last 4 1/2 years,” from 568 in 1980 to 299 in 1984. A near-miss is defined as an incident where planes pass within 500 feet of each other.

“This is a serious breach of duty by the FAA to give the American public the full range of risk which now (exists) in the skies,” Nader said. “They are misleading the traveling public.”

But a spokesman for the FAA declared that the agency “wasn’t covering up anything. It was a paper-work and accounting problem.”

FAA’s Promise

Some near-misses were not included in the agency’s totals for 1983 and 1984 because regional FAA offices failed to forward complete reports to Washington, the agency said. But the FAA promised that immediately it would “set up a system to account for all reports of close proximity of in-flight aircraft, regardless of the category in which they fall” and “to correlate them for public consumption.”

In the past, if two aircraft passed within 500 feet and the crews did not file a report, the incident was classified as an “operational error” rather than a “near midair collision.” But operational errors apply to any incident where two aircraft are within five miles of each other--a far less restrictive classification than a near-miss.

A spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Assn. said pilots have long known of the underreporting, while Nader called for a congressional investigation into the practice.

Nader also charged that the FAA may have underreported statistics in an effort to prove that the skies are as safe now as they were before a 1981 strike by air traffic controllers. President Reagan fired 11,000 veteran controllers who walked off the job and has refused to rehire them.