About the data
Every record on this site comes from one place: the aviation accident database published by the United States National Transportation Safety Board. Nothing is copied from other accident sites, and nothing about a cause is written here that is not in that database.
What is in it
181,007 accidents and incidents, from 1948 to 2026. 78,841 of them have coordinates and appear on the map; 102,166 do not, because the source record has no latitude and longitude. Those records are still searchable, still listed, and still have their own page.
The NTSB publishes three files, and this site imports all three:
- avall, everything from 2008 onward, republished every month.
- Pre2008, 1982 to 2008.
- PRE1982, 1962 to 1982. This is the oldest file and the thinnest: it has no coordinates at all, no narrative, and place names are cut off at seventeen characters. Records from that period therefore show less than newer ones.
What is not in it
The NTSB investigates civil aviation in the United States. It also takes part in investigations abroad when a US-registered or US-built aircraft is involved, and those records are in here too. What is not in here is the rest of world aviation: an accident in, say, Indonesia with an Indonesian aircraft and an Indonesian operator is investigated by that country and does not appear in this database.
So the numbers on the statistics page describe this dataset, not global aviation safety. Reading them as a world ranking would be wrong.
Military accidents are not included. Neither are events that never entered the NTSB system.
The summary on each page
Each record has a short paragraph at the top. It is assembled from the fields in that record: the date, the aircraft, the operator, the phase of flight, the injuries and the damage. It is written by a small piece of code with fixed sentences, not by a language model, and it can therefore not invent anything.
About the cause it says only one of two things. Either the NTSB has published a probable cause, in which case that statement is quoted below it word for word and attributed. Or it has not, in which case the page says the accident is still under investigation, or that no probable cause statement is present in the record. This site never guesses at a cause.
How it is kept up to date
The NTSB republishes the whole 2008-onward file at the start of every month. A scheduled job on this server downloads it a few days later and reimports it. Because the import matches on the NTSB's own record key, rerunning it updates records instead of duplicating them, and a record whose findings were revised gets the revision.
The two historical files do not change and were imported once.
Corrections
If a record here is wrong, it is almost certainly wrong in the source, and the fix belongs there: the NTSB record is the authority and every page links to it. If the fault is in how this site reads or displays the data, let us know and it will be corrected.
Copyright and reuse
The underlying data is a work of the United States federal government and is in the public domain. The original files are at data.ntsb.gov/avdata. This site is not affiliated with the NTSB and does not speak for it.
A note on tone
Every line in this database is an event in which people were hurt or died. The site is built to be useful to people who want to understand aviation, including young enthusiasts, and it tries to stay plain and factual for that reason. There are no photographs of wreckage, no rankings of the worst disasters, and no dramatisation.