Everything connects
An aircraft has a model, a maker, an engine, an owner and a home town; the town has airports; the airports have accidents, and the accidents have aircraft. This site treats those records as one connected graph. Every page that stands for one thing carries a Connections card listing its neighbours by type, and the same connections are available as data for programs and AI assistants.
How the records link
| From | Link | To |
|---|---|---|
| aircraft | is a | model |
| aircraft | made by | maker |
| aircraft | powered by | engine |
| aircraft | owned by | fleet |
| aircraft | registered in | state |
| aircraft | registered in the town of | airport |
| aircraft | involved in | accident |
| model | made by | maker |
| model | powered by | engine |
| engine | made by | engine maker |
| fleet | based in | state |
| airport | in | state |
| accident | at or near | airport |
| accident | in | state |
| accident | involved | model |
As data
Every page has a data twin at /graph/<type>/<id>.json, for example /graph/aircraft/N541JA.json, /graph/airport/SBA.json or /graph/model/cessna/172.json. It carries the same groups as the page's Connections card: the neighbour's name, its address, a count and a short note. A description of the whole graph is at /graph/index.json.
The whole graph, rebuilt every morning after the FAA update, compressed:
The nodes file lists every record with its type, name and address; the links file lists every connection as from, link, to. Owners appear only when they are an organisation. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, credit "FAA and NTSB data via eFlight Registry".
What is in it, and what is not
The graph is built from three public sources: the FAA's aircraft register (every registered aircraft, its model, engine code and owner, refreshed daily), the FAA's airport file (every landing place, every 28 days) and the NTSB's accident database (every accident and incident since 1982, weekly). The links are the ones those files state outright: an aircraft's model code, its engine code, the owner's town, the airport nearest an accident. Nothing is inferred.
People are never nodes. Pilots, mechanics, passengers and individual owners do not appear; owners are shown only when they are a company, a school, a club, a trust or a public body, as the FAA publishes them, and owners who asked the FAA to withhold their details stay withheld. Insurers, lenders' names and maintenance records are not in any public file and are not here.
Next layers, in the order planned: the certificates, FAA orders, approved parts and failure reports that connect every model to its components; the repair stations, charter operators and flight schools on the ground at each airport; the routes between airports.