FAA WILL RELEASE DATA ON AIRLINE SAFETY ON WEB.

Byline: Matthew L. Wald The New York Times

The Federal Aviation Administration, under pressure to release information on airline safety and mishaps, said Wednesday that it would do so next month on the World Wide Web, but that the information would not help rank airlines by safety.

Many of the reports are available only by filing a request under the Freedom of Information Act. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who had called for releasing more information shortly after the ValuJet crash in May, announced the new policy Wednesday and proclaimed, ``From now on, aviation secrets are going public.''

But aviation officials said that they have no statistics that can be used to rank airlines by safety, not even the information that the agency uses to decide which airlines need extra inspections.

Barry Bermingham, deputy administrator for system safety, said the FAA would strive to make information ``valuable in the public's mind,'' easily available. But he said such information would not allow a potential traveler, a statistician or anyone else to rank the airlines.

Joining the FAA in this opinion Wednesday was the Air Transport Association, which is the trade association of the big airlines.

``Are consumers going to be able to make a judgment? The answer is no, they're not,'' said David Fuscus, a spokesman. ``We're not aware of any way to take that information and come up with a valid way to compare one airline to another.''

The FAA compared safety among airlines last spring in a report it prepared for the transportation secretary giving the rates of accidents and incidents per departure for each airline. The report described itself as an effort to prove that low-cost carriers set up under deregulation were just as safe as established carriers. But officials said that ranking, which has not been repeated, would not help passengers trying to pick the safest airline.

``Past fatal accidents and nonfatal accidents do not predict safety,'' said Richard Golaszewski of GRA Inc., a consulting firm hired by the FAA to help establish new policy on releases of information. ``Knowing who had the last accident doesn't tell you a lot about who might have the next one,'' he said Wednesday.

``Right now, you really can't make meaningful distinctions among individual carriers.''

But the information that the FAA plans to make available will allow anyone with access to the World Wide Web to search through nearly 20 years of data, using a software ``search engine,'' to spot incidents of equipment failure, forced landings and other incidents.