Editorial Standards

What FlightFinder publishes

FlightFinder publishes structured aviation data (schedules, aircraft types, routes, airline and airport profiles, safety records) and plain-language summaries derived from named public sources. Article pages identify the source used for the underlying record.

Data sources

Sources include NTSB CAROL, FAA and Federal Register records, BTS, NASA ASRS, the national investigation bodies named on Attributions, adsb.lol, OurAirports, OpenFlights, and the FAA aircraft registry. Licensing details are listed in Attributions. Methodology detail: /methodology.

How summaries are produced

Some accident and incident summaries are machine-generated from structured database fields and official narrative text. Automated checks detect some numeric and formatting errors; they do not certify identities, chronology or causal claims. Where a summary conflicts with the official investigation report, the official report takes precedence and the summary is corrected or suppressed.

Authorship

Long-form data stories carry a named human byline: Denys Kolomiiets (Founder & editor, FlightFinder), with Person structured data. Automated accident/incident summaries and regulatory digests use the collective publisher FlightFinder Editorial — we do not invent fake individual bylines for machine output.

Indexability gates (what can appear in search)

Thin or combinatorial pages are served noindex, follow and omitted from the sitemap. The same thresholds drive both robots meta and sitemap enumeration so the two never disagree. Current floors (code constants in seoThinContent / accidentQualityScore):

• Accident pages — index only if fatal, quality score ≥ 50, or substantial published article (narrative ≥ 1200 chars with a visible article body). Non-fatal thin GA pages stay crawlable but noindex.
• News digests — only curated weekly / on-this-day digests with body ≥ 600 characters. Templated AD, recommendation, and incident briefs are noindex (facts live on safety/accident URLs).
• NTSB safety recommendations — index only Aviation recs whose original public-domain text is ≥ 400 characters; short one-liners noindex.
• NASA ASRS per-report pages — default noindex sitewide (mass thin). Individual reports can become indexable only if ASRS_REPORTS_INDEXABLE is enabled and narrative length ≥ 1000 chars with text actually shown on the page.
• Airline hubs — need ≥ 10 distinct destinations; safety airline analytics ≥ 10 occurrences, or ≥ 1 fatal accident.
• Hazard facets — e.g. wildlife airport pages ≥ 50 strikes; laser city pages ≥ 100 reports (and related floors for species, aircraft, drones, runway incursions).
• Commercial combinatorial surfaces (some route/airline×aircraft grids) may be paused from the index via COMMERCIAL_SURFACE_INDEXABLE while quality recovers.

Zero-route airports and other empty shells are noindex. Demand-gated sitemap slices (e.g. accident long-tail without impressions) may remain index,follow when linked internally but are not pushed in the sitemap.

Human review

Data stories and curated digests are reviewed before they are marked indexable: source agreement, factual accuracy, and no unsupported probable-cause language on open investigations. Bulk machine summaries that fail the numeric gates above never enter the index, review or not.

Probable cause and open investigations

Our editorial requirement is to avoid speculation while an investigation is open and attribute final findings to the official report. Automated publication checks do not verify every causal statement or guarantee that unsupported wording is absent. Check the original report and report a discrepancy through our corrections channel.

What we do not do

We do not accept payment to change safety-data content, alter official fatality counts or dates, remove records for reputational reasons, or publish speculation as fact.

Corrections policy

Send factual corrections and an authoritative source link to [email protected]. We verify against the upstream dataset and correct or suppress inaccurate summaries. See Contact.

Advertising and affiliate relationships

FlightFinder earns revenue from clearly identified affiliate booking links and subscriptions. Affiliate relationships do not affect news selection, safety content, or indexability.