FAA data offers stories for every newsroom in U.S.

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 2001 by Porter, Jeff

Terrorism struck home Sept. 11, 2001, and across the country newsrooms struggled with the stories.

Even for reporters thousands of miles away from the attacks, their readers and viewers did have at least one thing in common: Everywhere, people travel by air. So reporters began digging into the database of Federal Aviation Administration enforcement actions to find stories about their local airports.

The IRE and VICAR data library was deluged with telephone calls and data orders. IRE set up delivery via its FTP server. The data was on the regular schedule to be updated in October, so IRE pushed to update it even sooner. A series of text files was obtained from the FAA and turned into a series of dBase IV files so journalists could use the data in almost any database program.

That turned out to be a good decision. A few days later, the FAA turned off the data spigot. It could no longer be downloaded. It seems that the data was suddenly deemed "sensitive." Because of that,editors and reporters found interpreting the data daunting, with little help from the FAA. Both the data library and the NICAR-L e-mail discussion list agonized about trying to find answers about the complicated enforcement data.

Russ Clemings of the The Fresno Bee in California, found some discrepancies in the FAA's updated data,and IRE quickly discovered data entry inconsistencies affecting 567 of the 380,520 records in the main data table. The same day, IRE made cleaner data available, again through FTP.

The stories were many. Newspapers and television stations, from one coast to the other, examined in detail the security status for their local airports. Often, they used other data sources or paper records to flesh out their stories - for example, John Perry of The Daily Oklahoman used local police reports to confirm much of what he found in the data and find narrative detail.

Still, the FAA enforcement database isn't the only potential resource.

Using the FAA's airmen directory - a listing of most pilots certified by the U.S.government - reporters have found basic information about some of the hijackers. News organizations have looked at federal contracts to find the most likely companies to profit in the face of military buildup. Now, while airlines are seeking a federal bailout, reporters are considering stories about linking that industry to campaign contributions, using data from the Federal Election Commission.

If you're working on this story, here's a list of other databases, available through the NICAR data library (http://www.ire.org/datalibrary/ databases), that are potentially relevant:

Aircraft registry. The aircraft registration database, maintained by the FAA, includes information on more than 320,000 registered aircraft. These include all aircraft owned by individuals, businesses and governments in the U.S. Resident aliens may also register planes in the U.S.,as long as it is not registered in another country at the same time.

Air safety reports. The Air Safety Reporting System database consists of anonymous reports about aviation safety. Anyone is eligible to file a report, including air traffic controllers, pilots, flight attendants and passengers.

NTSB. The National Transportation Safety Board database contains information on civil aviation accidents and incidents, including pilot, crew and airplane descriptions, and environment conditions.

Accidents and incidents. An FAA database of mainly U.S. accidents or incidents, including crashes, collisions, deaths, injuries or costly damages.

For more information, contact the database library at 573-884-7332.

Jeff Porter is the director of the IRE and NICAR Database Library and an instructor at the Missouri School of Journalism. He joined IRE this year after working as a computer-assisted reporting specialist at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock. Reach him at jeff@ire.org.