NTSB Accident Plugin

[ChrisRikli]

I've made a habit of reading the NTSB preliminaries for the prior month at the beginning of each month here: http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/query.asp


I do this frequently enough that I hacked together a GreaseMonkey script to set:
- the date range to last month
- the category to 'airplanes'
- the operation to GA
- the investigation status to 'prelim'
- the records to 100 per page ordered by date ascending

Greasemonkey is a plugin for the Firefox browser. If you're unfamiliar, here's how to use my plugin:
1) Install Firefox (http://www.firefox.com)
2) Install the GreaseMonkey plugin (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748/). You will have to restart Firefox once this is done.
3) Install my plugin by clicking on this link: http://67.192.186.226/ntsb_last_months_acciden.user.js

If you're feeling adventurous, there is a setting you can change in the code to automatically submit the form.

Writing this has made me curious...is there an online application that is more interactive than the NTSB page? E.g., something that displays on Google maps, has some sliders set to change parameters, etc? And if there isn't, would there be interest in such a thing?

 

[weilke]

Whatever you do, set it up in a way that it doesn't strain the resources of the NTSB server. If too many people run scripted queries all day long, it will bog down the thing. At some point, they will include some sort of 'human user identification' system, the last thing I want is to decipher some chickenscratch jut to be able to pull up a report or two.

 

[ChrisRikli]

Whatever you do, set it up in a way that it doesn't strain the resources of the NTSB server. If too many people run scripted queries all day long, it will bog down the thing. At some point, they will include some sort of 'human user identification' system, the last thing I want is to decipher some chickenscratch jut to be able to pull up a report or two.

That's just good development practice, period, to not overload someone else's server with your junk.

All this plugin does is set a few fields for you.

If we were to create something to make it easier/more intuitive to explore accidents/incidents, we'd use the downloads that the NTSB provides rather then scraping or something sleazy, trust me. My company is as white hat as it gets.