About the Visualizations
These visualizations are based on a set of 180,000 aviation safety reports collected by NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System. The first visualization provides an overall view of commercial aviation safety reports based reports filed between 1988 and 2014. The second visualization focuses on recent human factors trends by including reports that cited specific human factors issues between 2009 and 2014. Together these visualization provide a foundation for analyzing and tracking both broad aviation safety issues and recent human factors trends.
The Aviation Safety Reporting System
The Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) is a large, publically accessible database of aviation safety reports voluntarily submitted by pilots, controllers, and other aviation professionals. The ASRS program analyzes each report to identify and classify the underlying factors present in each event. The result is a rich database that includes comprehensive information on the contextual, contributory, and causal factors impacting operational aviation safety.
A full description of the ASRS program goals and objectives can be found at http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/.
Gathering the Data
The publically accessible set of ASRS reports includes over 180,000 reports submitted between 1988 and 2014. In order to focus the visualizations around central themes, subsets of the overall data set were created for each visualization. The first visualization provides an overall view of commercial aviation safety reports based on 113,731 reports filed between 1988 and 2014. The second visualization focuses on recent human factors trends by including 23,330 reports that cited specific human factors issues between 2009 and 2014. Together these visualization provide a foundation for analyzing and tracking both broad aviation safety issues and recent human factors trends.
Making the Data Accessible
These visualizations were developed to provide a tool that enables aviation safety experts, non-aviation safety professionals, and aviation enthusiasts to draw meaningful conclusions from complex aviation data sets. As such, several of the data fields included in the ASRS raw data were modified to more clearly convey results to a non-technical audience. Click on a data field below for more information on these changes.
Time of Day descriptions
The raw ASRS data includes a local time of day for each event. The local time of day data is selected from one of four 6-hour time blocks. Fort Hill Group provided labels for those ranges to simplify data presentation for the user. The local time of day mapping is included below:
Data Label |
Local Time of Day |
|---|---|
Night |
00:00–06:00 |
Morning |
06:00–12:00 |
Afternoon |
12:00–18:00 |
Evening |
18:00–24:00 |
Aircraft Size Descriptions
To simplify the data presentation and the ability to filter by aircraft size, each aircraft in the raw dataset was grouped into one of 4 categories:
Small civilian fixed wing aircraft criteria
Small commercial aircraft including turboprops, regional jets, and seaplanes with 99 seats or less in a maximum single cabin configuration. Sample aircraft include the Canadair Regional Jet, Grumman G-73 Mallard, and Bombardier Dash 8 Turboprop (Q-400).
Medium civilian fixed wing aircraft criteria
Narrow body passenger or cargo aircraft that can be configured to seat 100 or more passengers in a single or multi-cabin configuration. Sample aircraft include the Airbus A-319, McDonnell Douglas MD-88, and Boeing 757.
Large civilian fixed wing
Wide body passenger or cargo aircraft. Sample aircraft include the Boeing 777, Airbus A380, and McDonnell Douglas DC-10/MD-10.
Other / Unknown
This includes military fixed wing aircraft, military rotorcraft, civilian rotorcraft, and data that could not be linked to a specific type of aircraft.