The Federal Aviation Administration released its database of wildlife strikes on planes this week in an abrupt about-face from previous policy.
The data is now available through web forms as well as in a downloadable Microsoft Access database.
There is a detailed record for each incident including the species of animal (when known), the airline, the airport, the height and speed of the plane, and occasionally intriguing notes ("FOUND FEATHERS AND REMAINS ON NOSE COWL. INGESTION").
While it contains tens of thousands of records, the database is not comprehensive. The FAA believes that only 20 percent of birdstrikes are reported and they caution that "comparisons between individual airports or airlines may be misleading."
Still, it's useful information and shows that the spirit of transparency that Barack Obama has promised to bring to the Executive branch might actually yield some results. As Dave Demerjian reports over on Autopia, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood forced the data out of the agency.
"The Department of Transportation is, among other things, a safety agency," LaHood wrote on his blog. "Public disclosure is our job. The sea change in government transparency is beginning, and we are happy to be a part of it."
We applaud the release, even though the formats in which the data was provided don't encourage reuse. So, as part of our ongoing attempt to open up government data, Wired.com has posted the data as text files that can be imported into the data manipulator of your choice.
- All the wildlife strike data zipped up (hat tip to Michael Garcia)
- Wildlife strikes from 1990-1999
- Wildlife strikes from 2000-2008
There's a ton of data, so we can't post it all to Google Documents, but just so you can play with it, we've made the key data from the set of 2008 strikes available in a Google Spreadsheet.
See Also:
- Open Data: Help Migratory Bird Observations Fly into the Digital
- Open Data: Shuttle Impacts From Space Junk
- Open Data: Rare Trove of Army Medical Photos Heads to Flickr
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and book site for The History of Our Future; Wired Science on Facebook.
