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.
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.
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.