I just flew with a rather paranoid, burned out and frustrated (for realistic reasons) captain this week. He made the point that it's not what you do but rather what you say you are doing that now matters. Just because the Feds are telling groups to have data compiled and shared doesn't mean that they actually a) have data that can do this, b) are actually going to do this, c) look at the data if it is compiled and d) use that data to improve safety if they do actually compile it.
But they can say they are doing this.
The first time I accessed a MITRE compiled database I nearly cringed. It was absolutely alarming to discover how much data they have, and at the same time quite impressive to see how they put all that raw data into usable formats.
That being said, it would be optimal if when a change was in the pipeline - that data was used to show what effect the change would have on any given airport.
However, when something ends up on CNN what normally happens is a thrown together fix, immediately, so it can be shown that "someone fixed it." (my humble opinion). THEN once it becomes evident (usually immediately after implementation) that the resolution required more than an "effective immediately" memo written in five minutes - operational impact data is taken into consideration and a long, drawn out, time consuming battle starts to undo the "effective immediately" and put something into place that actually addresses the problem.
Case in point, opposite direction operations. There was a botched flow change (incomplete coordination was used for the window) which resulted in a headline event about a year and a half ago. Almost immediately, all these changes were made to ODO (opposite direction operations) which when implemented nationally, caused a lot of havoc. But, someone "fixed" it. So it was all good...
What followed was months upon months of changes (sometimes numerous per week) and interpretations upon interpretations which led to nothing but confusion, and more memos and interpretations. Hell, within the last few weeks yet another "clarification" to the rule came down. It's been a LONG time and battle of VFR/IFR, circling approaches, practice approaches, what a tower can do, what an approach control can do, etc etc. And yet, not one discussion was had about flow change procedures - which is what caused the actual problem, at one particular airport.
TL;DR - I agree with the captain in the regard that the focus is on someone saying they did something to fix it every time something hits the 24 hour news cycle. However, the data is there - they just do that after the fact, and then spend months (sometimes years) attempting to undo and redo. It's really, really frustrating actually...
