Even though safety has always been the top priority of the aviation industry, fatal incidents do still occur. Following Malaysia Airline's recent successive incidents, passengers have been left wondering if there is a connection between airlines and incidents. Our app will show the relationship between an airline's socio-economic status and its fatality rate. As time goes by and technology advances, do incidents really decrease and by how much? Our app will show the distribution of different types of incidents for two periods (1985 to 1999 and 2000 to 2014) so that it's user may gain insights as to how numbers of different types of incidents have changed over time.
We will be visualizing a data set of safety records from the Aviation Safety Network's database which includes records for 30 years for 56 major commercial airlines. For each airline, there are three variables that are used to measure airline safety: incidents, fatal_accidents and fatalities. These have been reported as a count, once for the time period from 1985 to 1999 and once for the period from 2000 to 2014. There is also a column for the number of available seat kilometers flown by the airline each week (calculated as number of seats multiplied by kilometers flown) and one indicating whether or not the airline comes from a First World Country (as defined by Nations Online). We will also derive two new variables from the data set to use in our visualizations: fatality_rate (total fatalities divided by available seat kilometers) and lethality_rate (number of fatal accidents divided by number of incidents).
- Do certain airlines have more incidents than others (are certain airlines less safe)?
- Are certain airlines less equipped to deal with an incident (is an incident more likely to result in at least one fatality)?
- Do airlines from first world countries have less fatalities than those from non-first world countries?
One potential user of our Flight Explorer app could be a traveler who is concerned about safety and is a nervous flier and is looking to book a flight but has the option between a few different airlines. The traveler wants to understand whether certain airlines should be avoided in order to minimize their chances of being involved in an incident. They are also interested in viewing historically how well equipped different airlines are at dealing with an incident if one does occur. The Flight Explorer app will allow the traveler to compare safety records for airlines from all over the world by displaying records for 56 major airlines collected over 30 years of air travel. They can filter based on a number of criteria including time period, measure of airline safety and socio-economic status of the airline's home country. The traveler who is nervous about arriving safely at their destination can now remove some of their stress by using the Flight Explorer app to help them choose an airline with a good safety record. Some other example potential usages could include a government agency that wants to look at lethality rates for various airlines or an airline that wants to improve their safety record and is deciding what airline to model their safety protocols after, among many others.
(please note: this proposal is the same as the original proposal for Python dashboard, since the funtionalities of our app do not change.)