You get what you pay for — Uplink Archive

Free aviation data websites like Landings.com offer FAA Service Difficulty Reports but may be incomplete compared to full databases obtained through FOIA requests, with the official FAA data also having limitations. The article provides guidance on accessing aviation data from various sources including the FAA, NTSB, and other searchable databases for journalists.

There's a lot of free aviation data on the Web but it may be worth what you paid for it. Consider www.landings.com. It offers the Federal Aviation Administration's Service Difficulty Reports. To the uninitiated, these maintenance reports seem pretty complete. But beware. I compared the Landings site vs. the full database obtained by NICAR under the Freedom of Information Act. To run this test, I picked TWA flight 800, which crashed this summer near Long Island, at the Landings site.

The result: Landings showed 18 SDRs since November 1992, vs. 20 in the full database. In addition, in the history of SDRs, there are more than 100 for that aircraft. The Landings data is not in a rows-and-columns format that can be quickly downloaded for further analysis, though you can download the text of the reports. Also, key fields that give fuller versions of events are not available. I e-mailed Landings to reply on these problems, but did not get a reply. The outfit is not an official FAA site, and does warn that its data may not be complete. To be fair, Landings does offer a lot of aviation information, and does seem promising. It's just not complete.

To download official data, the FAA offers week-by-week ASCII files at http://www.fedworld.gov/ftp/faa-asi/faa-asi.htm. But the agency does not include a record layout for the data, and it only posts reports for the most recent two months. It will fax you a copy of the record layout. Call the FAA's Jim Gillespie at (405) 954-6484. But a word of caution: The data on this Web site is truncated. It, too, does not include fields available under the FOIA, including the airline's ranking of the severity of the problem.

Shameless NICAR plug: We've been revising and expanding the way we collect aviation data, and we will do searches by request or send copies of the data to journalists.

Here are other aviation sites that may help you cover aviation and airplane disasters:

The FAA

After jumping off FAA's main page at www.faa.gov, check out the links and publications listed at http://www.faa.gov/APA/publicat/GUIDETOC.htm FAA press releases are also at http://www.dot.gov/affairs/faaind.htm The agency's A Journalist's Guide to the FAA is at http://www.faa.gov/apa/publicat/jnalist.htm For the bulk of FAA data, plus advisories and other detailed information, visit ftp://ftp.fedworld.gov/pub/faa-oai/faa-oai.htm

The NTSB

Look up abbreviated National Transportation Safety Board accidents reports at http://www.ntsb.gov/Aviation/months.htm

The NTSB offers studies from its data at http://www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/Publictn.htm, and summary statistics at http://www.ntsb.gov/Aviation/aviation.htm

Other searchable sites

Search ownership records using Canadian tail numbers (they begin with a C) at http://www.cavok.com/registration.html

Landings, by the way, lets you search U.S. and U.K. tail numbers. I ran some sample tests and did not encounter any problems.

For a detailed listing of airports and navigational systems for those facilities, check out http://www.cc.gatech.edu/db1/fly/

This offers everything from usage figures to radio systems that pilots use to land.

For U.S. flight schools, visit http://www.aviationWeb.com/

The dirt on dirty aviation data

Those who have covered airline crashes know aviation data is tricky.

The FAA's Aircraft Catastrophic Failure Prevention Research Program at http://www.tc.faa.gov/aar400/aar431/ offers expansive information on crashes, including aviation industry complaints about journalists probing FAA data, and how U.S. aviation data is too dirty and incomplete to quickly spot safety problems.

Aside from checking the U.S. General Accounting Office itself, you can quickly look at its report on dirty aviation data at http://

Trade Groups:

The International and American Associations of Airport Executives run http://www.airportnet.org/ Information on certain lobbying efforts is off limits, but this does offer links to airports and information on airport security. National Business Aircraft Association is for those who fly corporate jets. At http://www.nbaa.org/ you can find tidbits such as positions on pending legislation. The Helicopter Association International offers some federal safety information at http://www.rotor.com/ But some reporters may be more intrigued by lobbying information, including stances against restrictions for flights over national parks.

Andrew Lehren can be reached at (573) 882-0684, or send e-mail to andy@nicar.org