26 Aug 1999

Description

This project will examine commercial aircraft accidents (hull loss or substantial damage with death or serious injury) according to location, contributing conditions (e.g., weather) and primary causes.

Only the full text of accident investigations would reveal investigators interpretation regarding causal chains of events leading to accidents. Study at this level would yield too few data points (in the time available this semester) for a meaningful analysis. I will focus on the NTSB "primary cause" instead. Incomplete records will not be included.

The objective is an improved visualization of aircraft accident data (when compared to standard graphs and charts).

Notes

1. An initial look at available data indicates that online NTSB records will be a source of accurate and reliable data, with the assumption that naming the city near which an accident occurred is adequate spatial precision. This appears to be a reasonable assumption; although an accident is certainly associated with precise latitude and longitude coordinates, the causal events underlying accidents are rarely, if ever, attributable to such precise locations (i.e., a "Bermuda Triangle" effect is extremely unlikely!).
   
   
2. I'll probably stick with the project in the "Description" above, but a few prospects to enhance/complicate the project exist. One idea is to relate cities' average weather conditions to aircraft accidents that occur near cities. NOAA sites provide mean climatic conditions, and it should be possible to rate U.S. cities for their "extreme" weather, and relate that metric to aircraft accidents. Another prospect is to examine aircraft type for accidents in extreme vs non-extreme weather cities. Also, I've continued to look for information that might support an analysis of air defense threat envelopes according to geographic/topographic placement. If something promising turns up quickly, I may still be able to examine this topic.

Data

Sources of data include Boeing Company offices, such as Airplane Safety Engineering, National Transportation Safety Board Aviation accident reports, and Flight Safety Foundation special reports.

Here are four sources of accurate, useful data:

1. Boeing Company:

This is the Boeing Company Airplane Safety Event Database maintained by the Company's Airplane Safety Engineering group. It contains about 50,000 records of jet (no prop) aircraft events and grows at a rate of about 200 per month. Location, date, contributing conditions, aircraft make and model (all mfgrs), and other details are included; codes are also included to aid in database searches. Th data are accurate, complete, and reliable; however, I must apply for access to this data base.

2. National Transportation Safety Board (A):

This is a web site for NTSB tables. It is a starting point for classifying data. These tables will be used as a cross-check to verify the accuracy of database searches of individual accident records. I'll compare the number of records returned in a search to the tabled values for annual number of accidents by aircraft type, etc., in various NTSB tables. If my search and the tabled values are pointing to the same parameters, then I should be able to count identical numbers of events.)

3. National Transportation Safety Board:

This is the search site for NTSB aviation accident records. The database contains about 43,000 brief synopses of accidents, covering all types of civilian air vehicles. A search for commercial aircraft operating under "Part 121 Scheduled" rules (generally large passenger jets) eliminates the great majority of these records. Additional search parameters such as accident versus incident will help to classify the records. Unfortunately, the records are not coded for details so reading many synopses may be inevitable, based on the objectives of this project. The data in these records is accurate and useful for my project, except where a record is marked "Prelim" meaning that the NTSB does not yet present its entries as factual.

4. National Ocanic and Atmospheric Administration:

This site contains historic environmental data for locations (cities). This site will be a useful source of data if a review of accident data suggests value in additional information about weather conditions. For example, cities that are likely to experience extremes of temperature and snowfall/precipitation may be associated with more aircraft accidents than cities unlikely to experience weather extremes. In some cases, accident data would have to be normalized for number of aircraft of a particular type in the civilian fleet.

ADDENDUM:

None