Five days before the door blew out, a mechanic wrote up a door that would not open. Only insiders could read the report. Now anyone can.
1.76 million aircraft defect reports, filed since 1995 with the FAA, the US aviation regulator, now in plain English.
What this is
Every day, mechanics in the United States write up what they found wrong on a plane and file it with the FAA. The FAA publishes it, for inspectors: landing gear is ZONE 700, an unscheduled landing is the letter A, and the mechanic’s own words sit underneath in trade shorthand.
This site reads all of it for you, answers in ordinary language, and finds the patterns hidden in the file: the same part on several aircraft, the same fault returning to one tail, the tick box that contradicts the sentence under it.
Why you should read it
Because the warning is often already in the file. The aircraft from the Netflix documentary Freefall was written up five days before its door plug blew out: a different door, hard to open, grounded, lubricated and passed its test the same day. The FAA file never puts those two reports side by side. This site does, on one page, and it does the same for every aircraft in the file. Airlines write up the same part on several aircraft on the same day. Boxes get ticked that contradict the sentence beneath them.
If you are about to board, type a flight number and a date and read what was filed on that aircraft. A journalist gets leads: the same part on several aircraft of one airline on one day, or a box ticked that contradicts the write-up under it. A researcher gets 1.76 million reports readable at once, and can ask them questions in plain words. If you lost someone: it is your file too.
Why it exists
In Freefall, a father who lost a child in a crash sits at a computer trying to read this same database. It takes him hours to get anywhere. With this tool it takes seconds.
What it does
Open any report and the model reads the codes, the ticked boxes and the mechanic’s own words together, live, and makes sense of them where they contradict each other: what happened, whether anyone was in danger, what to check next. Pick an airline, a zone, a month or a tail and it reads up to 300 reports at once: what recurs, one aircraft’s whole life, two airlines side by side. Every quote is checked against the record before you see it.
Worth knowing
Few have swept this archive for these patterns, so the findings grow as people look: the contradictions found so far.
Moments after the site was entered in a Cerebral Valley hackathon, the Foundation for Aviation Safety wrote in. Ed, from the Foundation: “It looks impressive. I’m hoping to dig into it further.” They asked for a walkthrough. That is the test of a tool like this: whether the people who work on the problem every day want to use it.
The same model built a complete working version of this site on its own, from 12,000 words of written instructions. All of it cost $1.07 in model calls.
Every one carries a mechanic’s write-up in trade shorthand. the model reads them live to explain to you what actually happened. Watch how it works, 83 seconds
Narrows to what you selected
Answers from the whole file