“Yes, And” Approach Also Retains Familiar Excel Tables
By NTSB Safety Advocacy Team
Before reading any further, start exploring this dashboard. Addictive, right? If you care about aviation accidents, the NTSB’s dashboards get the statistics to you in an interactive format that always seems to have another layer to discover.
If you use the NTSB’s static accident spreadsheets in Excel, you can keep using them. But you’re getting less information, with less control, than is available to you through the agency’s data dashboards. Many users grab the same data regularly to populate legacy products, but if you want to see the data from many points of view with more control, check out the data dashboards.
In the new US Civil Aviation Accident Dashboard, for example, you can customize a range of years, see the data on a map, and filter by accident details for Part 121, Part 135, and general aviation (GA) flights. Familiar Excel tables, such as Accidents by Defining Events and Phases of Flight, are still available, but the dashboard lets you further customize the selected data dynamically by operation type, injury level, and state, delivering many more possible data views than the tables provide.
Historically, the NTSB provided the annual census first as a printed book, and then as an annually updated set of Excel spreadsheets, and now, finally, as a dashboard. Additional GA data is also available in the new format. (And, because it was our first dashboard, it was rolled out alongside a video tutorial providing instructions for working with it.)
“We rolled out the GA dashboard for Oshkosh (EAA Airventure),” says Senior Aviation Accident Analyst Nathan Doble, who made the annual US Civil Aviation data available and interactive in dashboard form. “We recognized that this is a new capability for many of our users, so we wanted to provide training and solicit their feedback.”
Chief Data Scientist Loren Groff adds the team was conscientious about enhancing customer experience. “We took a ‘Yes And . . .’ approach with all of the dashboards. We’ll give you that familiar government document and we’ll also give you the new dashboard version with so much more control by the user.”
“Then there is the state-by-state, monthly breakdown,” Groff explains. “We had a congressional requirement to report accidents in Alaska monthly. The NTSB data analytics team thought, if we’re doing it for Alaska, why not do it for all the states?” (The monthly data are actually updated daily and organized by year and month.)
You can bring up a list of accidents covered in all of the dashboards, which in turn link to accident reports, and plot the accidents on a map. For GA accidents, you can see what types of findings and what recommendations the NTSB has issued in connection with accidents that meet the users’ filters.
Groff, Doble, and the NTSB data analytics team are taking the agency’s accident data from static tables to powerful interactive dashboards defined by the user, and in the process offering increased content and capabilities. Stay tuned as the NTSB’s dashboard capabilities continue to grow.
