"It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now
statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States
in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing
achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the
catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now
and then."
Steven Johnson
When one mentions plane crashes, the first thing that comes to mind is
dreadful pictures of half-burnt air behemoths snapped in two, big
headlines, and news articles that speak about tragic, fatal incidents
with almost no survivors.
However...
Is this really always the case? Does a solid foundation for this
outlook exist in data? How did aviation change and evolve during the
recent history?
Our goal is to answer these questions and more, by presenting the data
from the
NTSB aviation accident dataset
through several interactive visualizations.
Does the number of crashes increase or decrease over time? During which season are they more frequent? Scroll down to see the answer!
Our first visualization aims to give an overview of temporal trends
in aviation. The condegram to the right illustrates how the number
of crashes changed over time, with the height of the bar
corresponding to the number of crashes in the given month of the
given year.
Besides the decreasing trend in the number of crashes, we can also
see periodical oscillations.
Indeed, more crashes occur during the summer than during the winter!
It is unlikely that crashes are evenly distributed across all states, but where are they more frequent? During which phase of flight are they more likely to occur? Scroll down to see the answer!
Our third visualization aims to give an overview of geographical
trends in crashes. The map on the right depicts the relative number
of crashes per county of each state. We can see that most of these
crashes occur in California, Texas, and Florida. By clicking on a
state, we can explore how these crashes are distributed in each of
the states. For example, most of the crashes in California occurred
in the vicinity of Los Angeles.
We can also observe that crashes are most frequent during the
"takeoff" phase. While they are very rare during the "taxi" phase.
However, the geographical location of crashes varies significantly
per airline! Notice that, for example, "Delta Airlines" has the
highest number of incidents in Georgia. This could be explained by
the fact that the headquarters of "Delta Airlines" is in Atlanta,
Georgia.
However, this reasoning doesn't generalize to the other two
companies. For example, the headquarters of "United Airlines" is in
Illinois, while the state in which crashes were most frequent is
California.
