Aircraft-Wildlife Collisions

Description

A collection of all collisions between aircraft in wildlife that were reported to the US Federal Aviation Administration between 1990 and 1997, with details on the circumstances of the collision.

Usage

birds

Format

A data frame with 19302 observations on the following 17 variables.

opid

Three letter identification code for the operator (carrier) of the aircraft.

operator

Name of the aircraft operator.

atype

Make and model of aircraft.

remarks

Verbal remarks regarding the collision.

phase_of_flt

Phase of the flight during which the collision occurred: Approach, Climb, Descent, En Route, Landing Roll, Parked, Take-off run, Taxi.

ac_mass

Mass of the aircraft classified as 2250 kg or less (1), 2251-5700 kg (2), 5701-27000 kg (3), 27001-272000 kg (4), above 272000 kg (5).

num_engs

Number of engines on the aircraft.

date

Date of the collision (MM/DD/YYYY).

time_of_day

Light conditions: Dawn, Day, Dusk, Night.

state

Two letter abbreviation of the US state in which the collision occurred.

height

Feet above ground level.

speed

Knots (indicated air speed).

effect

Effect on flight: Aborted Take-off, Engine Shut Down, None, Other, Precautionary Landing.

sky

Type of cloud cover, if any: No Cloud, Overcast, Some Cloud.

species

Common name for bird or other wildlife.

birds_seen

Number of birds/wildlife seen by pilot: 1, 2-10, 11-100, Over 100.

birds_struck

Number of birds/wildlife struck: 0, 1, 2-10, 11-100, Over 100.

Details

The FAA National Wildlife Strike Database contains strike reports that are voluntarily reported to the FAA by pilots, airlines, airports and others. Current research indicates that only about 20\ Wildlife strike reporting is not uniform as some organizations have more robust voluntary reporting procedures. Because of variations in reporting, users are cautioned that the comparisons between individual airports or airlines may be misleading.

Source

Aircraft Wildlife Strike Data: Search Tool - FAA Wildlife Strike Database. Available at https://datahub.transportation.gov/Aviation/Aircraft-Wildlife-Strike-Data-Search-Tool-FAA-Wild/jhay-dgxy. Retrieval date: Feb 4, 2012.

Examples

library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(forcats)
library(tidyr)

# Phase of the flight during which the collision occurred, tabular
birds |>
  count(phase_of_flt, sort = TRUE)

# Phase of the flight during which the collision occurred, barplot
ggplot(birds, aes(y = fct_infreq(phase_of_flt))) +
  geom_bar() +
  labs(x = "Phase of flight")

# Height summary statistics
summary(birds$height)

# Phase of flight vs. effect of crash
birds |>
  drop_na(phase_of_flt, effect) |>
  ggplot(aes(y = phase_of_flt, fill = effect)) +
  geom_bar(position = "fill") +
  labs(x = "Proportion", y = "Phase of flight", fill = "Effect")