Microproduct data guidebeginner

NTSB Aviation Accident Database

Civil aviation accident and incident investigations for building safety monitors and event-history tools.

Start the guide Open official source

At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Small · ≤0.2 GB
Formats
JSON, CSV, XML
Access
Download or API
API key
Not required
Provider
National Transportation Safety Board
Updates
Daily
Data terms
U.S. Government public data / federal copyright guidance

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

NTSB CAROL and the aviation query page expose accident records with aircraft, location, and injury severity. Start with one year and one state. Preliminary reports change, this is not a live ADS-B feed, and it is not a complete global accident census.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Open the NTSB aviation query page and note CAROL as the current retrieval tool.
  2. 2.Request a bounded JSON export for one year.
  3. 3.Keep NTSB number, event date, location, and highest injury.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/GenerateRecentFile/6",
    params={"fileType": "json"},
    timeout=60,
)
response.raise_for_status()
payload = response.json()
accidents = pd.DataFrame(payload if isinstance(payload, list) else payload.get("data", payload))
accidents["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(accidents.head())
4

Test a useful signal

List recent U.S. aviation accidents

Test whether an NTSB extract can power a bounded safety-event inbox.

  1. 01Keep NTSB number, event date, location, and injury severity from the extract.
  2. 02Count events by highest injury and list records missing coordinates.
  3. 03Explain that preliminary investigations change and that NTSB records are not live aircraft positions.

Dataset details

National Transportation Safety Board is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-18. Temporal coverage: historical and current NTSB civil aviation investigations.

Theme

Geospatial & Infrastructure

Domains

AviationTransportationPublic Safety

Data types

Event DataTabularGeospatial

Tasks

Safety AnalysisEvent MonitoringMapping

Geography

United States

Formats

JSONCSVXML

Provider

National Transportation Safety Board

Data terms

U.S. Government public data / federal copyright guidance