How FlightFinder gathers its data

Data sources, refresh cadence and validation methodology.

Data sources

Jonty/airline-route-data (community)
A weekly-updated global airport + route inventory maintained at github.com/Jonty/airline-route-data. Provides airport metadata (IATA, ICAO, lat/lon, timezone, elevation) and which carriers fly each route. Updated weekly; we mirror nightly.
FlightConnections.com (our crawl)
Public route-map pages, scraped under fair-use derivative terms. Provides per-airline aircraft assignments — which aircraft type each carrier operates on each route. Updated quarterly.
FAA Releasable Aircraft Database
US public-domain dataset for aircraft tail-number → type lookups.
NTSB Aviation Accident Database
US public-domain accident records, surfaced on our safety overlay.

Cross-validation

Every route shown on FlightFinder is independently confirmed by at least one source. Routes appearing in only one source are flagged on the page with a "single-source" badge. The freshness date shown on each page reflects when its sources were last cross-validated.

Safety data

Occurrence corpus (accidents & incidents)
FlightFinder's accident and incident pages are built from an occurrence corpus aggregated from 123 sources in our source registry — chiefly national and regional investigation authorities, for example the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), the French Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses (BEA), the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB), the Japan Transport Safety Board (JTSB) — plus public safety datasets. Licensing and attribution information is on /legal/attributions.
NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS)
Voluntary, de-identified incident reports submitted by pilots, controllers and crew to NASA's ASRS program, surfaced on our incidents pages.
FAA wildlife strike, laser strike and runway incursion datasets
Public-domain FAA datasets covering wildlife strikes, laser illumination reports, and runway incursion events, aggregated into per-airport and per-year statistics.
EASA Airworthiness Directives & Safety Information Bulletins
Directives and bulletins published by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency. Airworthiness Directives are refreshed by an automated daily worker; Safety Information Bulletins, published less frequently, are refreshed weekly.
NTSB safety recommendations
Safety recommendations issued by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, pulled daily from NTSB's CAROL system.

When the same accident or incident is reported by more than one investigation authority, FlightFinder collapses those reports into a single occurrence record. Matching is keyed primarily on the aircraft registration and event date, falling back to event location and date, or to a per-source identifier when neither registration nor location is available. Where sources disagree, the record from the source ranked highest in our internal priority list is kept — national investigation authorities together with the U.S. NTSB and Australian ATSB rank highest, secondary aggregators such as Wikidata rank lowest — and any field the top-ranked record leaves blank is filled in from the other matching reports; every contributing source is still recorded and linked. Datasets outside this occurrence corpus — ASRS, the FAA wildlife/laser/runway-incursion datasets, and EASA directives/bulletins — are not deduplicated against it, as they describe different report types.

Airline records on a route

The turbulence route checker lists the airlines observed on a route and, for each, what our accident and incident records hold: how many occurrences are attributed to that carrier, how many were fatal, how many were hull losses, when the most recent fatal accident was, and the size and average age of the fleet we track.

These are counts, not a rating. We publish no safety score and no letter grade for airlines. An earlier version of this page described one; it was removed before launch because the data cannot support it. Our occurrence corpus attributes only a minority of records to a specific operator, and that gap is not evenly spread between carriers — so any formula over these counts would rank how well documented an airline is as much as how safely it flies, and would do so about named companies in a context where readers act on what they read.

Read the figures as a floor rather than a complete history: events we never matched to a carrier are missing from them, so a low count can mean a good record or a thin one, and the two are not distinguishable from the numbers alone. A zero is never presented as a clean record. Every airline shown meets the same regulatory safety requirements, which is the assurance that does not depend on our matching rate.

What we do not do

  • We do not generate flight data with AI. Every numerical claim traces to a named source.
  • We do not show real-time availability on indexable pages — that lives behind the search UI.
  • We do not publish data behind paid subscriptions on these pages.

Author

Editor: Denys Kolomiiets.

Loading safety records…

Frequently asked questions

How do I check the safety record of an aircraft or airline?

Type an aircraft model, airline, airport or tail number into the search box — FlightFinder opens its safety profile with accident history, incident reports and hazard data from official sources.

Where does the safety data come from?

From official public sources — NTSB, FAA, NASA ASRS, EASA and other national authorities — normalized into one database. Methodology and source list are published on the site, and the dataset has a citable DOI.