Be prepared, say the Boy Scouts. In the last few months, more and more journalists are saying it, too.
Indeed, one of the consistent lessons from almost any disaster is to keep a warehouse of data, preparing it for instant use for the next catastrophe. The advantages are twofold: There's no wait for the data, and reporters, without the pressure of disaster, can begin understanding the best uses and pitfalls of the data.
Case in point: FAA enforcement data, which many newsrooms used to focus on security breaches in airports after terrorist attacks killed thousands on U.S. soil.
The Web searches can be excellent starting points, especially on deadline, but only in a limited way.
"It was obvious on Sept. 11 that airport security had failed dreadfully," says Ron Campbell with the Orange County Register. "The FAA database showed that the failure was systemic. It showed many, many failures at every major airport nationwide for several years. It showed that the system worked on Sept. 11 exactly the way it was designed to work - badly."
The database, though, has its own limitations. It's often cryptic and open to interpretation (see numerous accounts of the use of the data in this edition of Uplink). While the data included the cases in which FAA inspectors penetrated airport security during surveillance, it didn't include those times when airport screeners caught them. The database, after all, is about enforcement actions. If the airport screeners did their job, no enforcement action is required.
"As valuable as the FAA database was, it has huge gaps," Campbell says. "We don't know how many times security caught the FAA trying to penetrate security, so there is no way to determine which airports had the worst security. We can't even compute a nationwide security breach rate, since the FAA won't say on a national level how often they tried to breach security but were stopped by alert guards."
Citing vague security concerns, the FAA refused to answer even rudimentary questions about the data.
Years before the terrorist attacks, Elizabeth Marchak of The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) pushed preparation for aviation disasters. Never, she wrote in a conference handout that's available from the IRE Resource Center, use data on deadline you've never seen before.
By their very nature, databases are incomplete, according to Marchak, and it takes some experience to fully understand those limitations.
Online aviation data
There are a few shortcuts, thanks to the World Wide Web, that allow reporters to look up simple information about aircraft, pilots, accidents and incidents. So part of preparing for disaster coverage is conscientiously bookmarking Web sites. Numerous IRE tipsheets show Web addresses that would help. Again, though, the searchable online databases are incomplete and limited. It pays to read the fine print even on a government Web site.
The FAA Flight Standards Service Web site promotes itself as providing safety-related information, and in fact, it's a place worth bookmarking. Reporters can look up airworthiness directives and recent service difficulty reports, search for pilot schools, and link to search pages for accidents and incidents, both from the FAA and the NTSB.
Another FAA Web presence: the FAA Civil Aviation Registry, where a reporter can look up ownership of an aircraft, by registration number or serial number.
A non-government but useful Web site comes from Aviation Research Group/US Inc. You can sign up to receive preliminary accident information via e-mail for free. According to the company's Web site, several times a day it downloads the FAA's preliminary accident files, then sends out automatic notifications to e-mail subscribers. You can choose categories and filters, too. For example, you can choose to receive only notifications of all multi-engine airplanes, or just single and multi-engine jets, or just helicopters.
Like the databases residing on a reporter's desktop or a newsroom's network, though, Web-based or e-mailed data have limitations, too. The FAA's lookup information on service difficulty reports, for example, only go back to 1995. The actual database of SDRs, though, goes back to 1974. One can look up ownership of particular aircraft through the FAA Civil Registry Web search, but it's problematic to summarize and count how many airplanes of a certain type are owned by a particular company.
Preparation is key
The Web searches can be excellent starting points, especially on deadline, but only in a limited way. They don't take the place of actually obtaining and understanding the data.
And that should take place not in the heat of a disaster, but beforehand, when authorities are less harried and, in the case of the FAA, might be more open.
"The FAA database taught me a lesson for the future," Campbell says. "When getting government databases, always find out how the data is compiled. In the case of the FAA database, we know that airport security guards, airport security coordinators and FAA inspectors all must have filled out reports. There is undoubtedly a manual telling these folks how to fill out reports, explaining for example when to charge multiple violations for a single offense. But we don't have that manual, and it's extremely unlikely post-Sept. 11 that the FAA will give it up."
Jeff Porter can be reached by e-mail at jeff@nicar.org