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Trying to restore public faith in air travel, hundreds of airline officials and government regulators gathered today for what the Transportation Secretary called a "ruthlessly honest self-evaluation" of the state of airline safety.

But while the Secretary, Federico F. Pena, said that air travel was exceptionally safe and even pledged that "we will not settle for anything less than zero accidents," the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency, said that some important questions -- like airline management, oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration and safety management -- were not on the conference's agenda.

The chairman, James E. Hall, said: "Can we reach the goal of 'zero accidents' without explicitly facing these issues? I think not." Mr. Hall pointedly asked whether the industry was taking all the steps it could to prevent accidents, including improving the data recorders, or "black boxes," on older planes.

On late-model planes the black boxes record data about dozens of parts of the plane, like the positions of the rudder and flaps, and often tell investigators precisely why a plane crashed; the boxes on older planes record only a few bits of information, like airspeed and altitude.

"In this age of high technology, the American public is puzzled when we can lose a major aircraft like a 737 in Colorado Springs and not be able to determine what happened to it," Mr. Hall said, referring to a 1991 crash in which 25 people died. He added that the Boeing 737 that crashed near Pittsburgh last year, killing all 132 on board, also had an inadequate flight data recorder.

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Both Mr. Hall and Mr. Pena spoke in a public session before the aviation experts attending the conference broke off into workshops on crew training, air traffic control and weather, safety data collection and use, application of new technologies, aircraft maintenance, and development of flight operating procedures.

The aviation experts, many of whom have long been at odds with each other about how much needs to be spent on safety items, argued their positions in detail in those sessions, which were closed to reporters. A spokeswoman for the F.A.A., Sandra Allen, said that the issues were highly technical and could be misunderstood by people outside the industry and that some participants wanted the sessions closed because they might take positions that they would abandon later.

Anthony J. Broderick, the agency's associate administrator for regulation and certification, said some participants felt that speaking frankly about safety questions could hurt their "flying reputations."

The workshops were supposed to develop recommendations on safety steps, and make public presentations on Tuesday morning.

A continuing theme in the public session was that the number of fatalities per flight hour would have to continue to decline or else the total number of fatalities would grow as airline traffic increased, a situation that would harm the image of the industry.

The administrator of the F.A.A., David R. Hinson, said that "over the past 15 years, flying has become so commonplace and accidents so rare that people now seem to believe that the system is essentially 100 percent risk-free."

"Expectations are so high that when an aviation accident does occur, it can dramatically distort the public's view of aviation safety," he said.

"There has always been an attitude we can almost get to zero accidents, but somebody will always have an accident. I think we need to dispense with that attitude," Mr. Hinson said.

Early this evening, Mr. Broderick said that three ideas were emerging from the workshops as "consistent themes." One was to improve the hardware and software used in aircraft training simulators, both for commuter planes, where simulator use is spotty, and for larger planes.

Another idea was to speed up the introduction of new equipment in the cockpit, including global positioning systems that use a network of satellites launched by the Pentagon. Electronic receivers, which are already available at consumer electronics stores, sense where the satellites are and give precise longitude and latitude; they can also give altitude. A second new technology uses data links between the air traffic controllers and the pilots so that instructions could move in text form, like e-mail, instead of by voice.

The workshop groups also agreed that the F.A.A. needs to streamline the process for approving new rules.

One airline yesterday jumped the gun on a requirement that the F.A.A. hopes to impose later this year: making commuter airlines meet the same crew-training standards as bigger airlines. Delta Air Lines announced that it would bring its commuter affiliates, five airlines doing business under the name the Delta Connection, up to the safety standards of Delta itself later this year. Delta also said it would hold joint safety appraisals with its affiliates, and establish a joint safety council.

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