About the data

Flight Findings puts aviation accidents and incidents from two public sources on one map: the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Wikipedia. It's a way to explore what happened. It is not a complete record, and it can't tell you how safe an airline or an aircraft is.

There are 183,329 records right now, 166,729 of them on the map. NTSB records start in 1962. Wikipedia goes further back: the oldest record is from 1902. The data was last updated on 26 Sept 2026.

Where the records come from

The NTSB investigates civil aviation accidents in the United States and publishes its database. We use the current database and the NTSB's older archives, which go back to 1962. Outside the US it only has events the NTSB helped with. Older records are thinner: before 1982 most are coded values with at most a short remark.

Wikipedia has articles on individual accidents all over the world, mostly the bigger ones. 3,922 records come from these articles. Where the NTSB and Wikipedia describe the same event, they're combined into one record, and the record page shows which source each fact came from. A few articles exist only in other languages; we translate those with AI help, mark them as translated, and link the original.

New NTSB data arrives in periodic batches, not as a live feed, so the newest events can take a while to show up. Recently added lists what each update brought in.

What it can't tell you

Plenty of accidents aren't here, especially smaller ones outside the US. Country totals mostly reflect where the NTSB works, not where accidents happen.

The numbers are counts, not rates. There's no data on how many flights or hours each airline or aircraft type flew, so a type that shows up often may simply be one that flies a lot. Please don't use these counts to rank airlines or aircraft for safety.

Where a plane sits on the map

When a source gives coordinates, that's where the plane goes, after a check that they roughly match the place named in the record. When there are no usable coordinates, we put the plane at the centre of the town or airport the record names. Those planes have a ring around them and the record says “Estimated position”: the real site could be kilometres away. Records we can't place at all stay off the map but still appear in the list and the statistics.

A plane points toward the flight's destination when we know it, otherwise north. It isn't the aircraft's actual heading. The lines drawn when you open a record are straight lines between the reported airports and the site, not the route the aircraft flew.

How records are checked

The raw data has mistakes, so we check records against better sources where we can. Most of this checking was done with AI help, following written rules, and every change is noted on the record with the value it replaced. Nobody has reviewed these checks independently yet.

• Against the NTSB final report (8 records): checked fact by fact, with links to the report.
• Against the investigating country's report (159): when another country led the investigation, its report replaces the NTSB's early figures. Reports whose terms don't allow reuse, like the French BEA's, are only compared, and differences are noted on the record.
• Against the NTSB's own written account (174,424): obvious errors are corrected, and anything doubtful is tagged rather than changed.
• Unreviewed (5,735): records with little or nothing written about them yet. They're hidden unless you turn them on in Filters, and they show as faded planes.

We never fill in a value that no source gives. If something is unknown, it says unknown. A missing death toll is never counted as zero.

Reading the details

Dates are local dates. The NTSB stores times in UTC, which would push many evening accidents in the Americas to the next day.

Death tolls are for the whole event, including people on the ground where the source counts them. Where sources disagree, we checked the investigation report or another reliable source, and the record shows where its figure comes from.

Aircraft models are grouped into types, so a Cessna 172N and a 172S both count as a Cessna 172. The kind of flight (airline, charter and commuter, general aviation, military or government) is based on the rules the flight was operating under and who operated it. The glossary explains terms like IMC, phase of flight and substantial damage.

The narratives and probable causes on record pages are the NTSB's own words, unedited. Names appear as the public sources publish them; private aircraft owners are labelled as private individuals.

Spotted a mistake?

Every record page has a “Report a problem” link. Corrections are welcome, especially from people who know the event.

Credits

NTSB data and report text are public domain. Flight Findings is independent and isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the NTSB. You can get the original data from the NTSB website .

Wikipedia text is used under CC BY-SA 4.0 and credited to its authors on each record. Wikidata is CC0. Town positions come from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and airports from OurAirports.