✈️ NTSB Aviation Accident Scraper

🚀 Scrape 178,000+ transportation accident records from the NTSB CAROL database with injury levels, aircraft details, locations, probable cause, and investigation status. Filter by mode, city, severity, and date range.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-04-17

The National Transportation Safety Board investigates every civil aviation accident in the United States, plus significant incidents in highway, marine, pipeline, and railroad transportation. This Actor queries the NTSB's CAROL database and returns structured records with event dates, locations, injury severity, aircraft make and model, registration numbers, investigation status, probable cause findings, and more. You can filter by transportation mode, city, injury level, registration number, and date range.

Safety researchers studying crash patterns, insurance professionals assessing risk, journalists investigating incidents, and aviation consultants tracking NTSB findings all need this data in a structured format. Instead of clicking through individual case pages, you get a clean dataset with hundreds or thousands of records in one run.

Target	NTSB CAROL Database
Use Cases	Safety research, insurance risk analysis, aviation incident investigation, regulatory monitoring

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📋 What it does

• ✈️ Accident records. Event dates, locations, injury levels, investigation status, and probable cause findings from 178,000+ NTSB records.
• 🔧 Aircraft details. Make, model, registration number (N-number), and operator information for aviation incidents.
• 🏥 Injury data. Highest injury severity for each accident: fatal, serious, minor, or none.
• 🚂 Multiple modes. Search across Aviation, Highway, Marine, Pipeline, and Railroad investigations.
• 📅 Date and location filtering. Narrow results by city, injury level, registration number, and date range.

Each record includes the event date, city, state, country, highest injury level, transportation mode, aircraft make and model, registration number, report status, probable cause, NTSB entry ID, and scrape timestamp.

💡 Why it matters: The NTSB CAROL web interface requires manual clicking through individual case pages. This Actor collects thousands of structured records in seconds, ready for analysis in spreadsheets, databases, or dashboards.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
mode	string	"Aviation"	Transportation mode: Aviation, Highway, Marine, Pipeline, or Railroad.
state	string	-	Search by city name (e.g., "Denver", "Los Angeles", "Houston").
aircraftMake	string	-	Search by aircraft registration number (N-number, e.g., "N12345").
highestInjury	string	-	Filter by highest injury severity: Fatal, Serious, Minor, or None.
startDate	string	-	Start date for date range filter (MM/DD/YYYY).
endDate	string	-	End date for date range filter (MM/DD/YYYY).
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum records to return. Free users limited to 10. Paid users up to 1,000,000.

Example: Fatal aviation accidents in Denver from 2020-2024.

{
    "mode": "Aviation",
    "state": "Denver",
    "highestInjury": "Fatal",
    "startDate": "01/01/2020",
    "endDate": "12/31/2024",
    "maxItems": 50
}

Example: All recent aviation accidents.

{
    "mode": "Aviation",
    "startDate": "01/01/2025",
    "maxItems": 200
}

⚠️ Good to Know: The NTSB CAROL database contains 178,000+ records spanning decades. Dates use MM/DD/YYYY format. The scraper processes about 100 records per second.

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📊 Output

Each record contains 12+ fields. Download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
📅 EventDate	string	"01/15/2023"
📍 City	string	"Denver"
🗺️ State	string	"Colorado"
🌍 Country	string	"United States"
🏥 HighestInjury	string	"Fatal"
🚀 Mode	string	"Aviation"
✈️ AircraftMake	string	"Cessna"
✈️ AircraftModel	string	"172S"
🔢 RegistrationNumber	string	"N12345"
📋 ReportStatus	string	"Probable Cause"
🆔 entryId	string	"20230115X00001"
🕐 scrapedAt	string	"2026-04-09T12:00:00.000Z"

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🗄️	178,000+ records. Decades of NTSB investigation data in one searchable tool.
🚂	5 transportation modes. Aviation, Highway, Marine, Pipeline, and Railroad.
🏥	Injury filtering. Filter by fatal, serious, minor, or no-injury incidents.
📍	Location search. Find accidents by city name.
🔢	N-number lookup. Search by aircraft registration number.
⚡	Fast processing. About 100 records per second.
📅	Schedule-ready. Monitor new investigations with weekly scheduled runs.

The NTSB has investigated over 178,000 transportation accidents since its founding in 1967, making its CAROL database one of the most detailed safety records in the world.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Setup
⭐ NTSB Accident Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	178,000+ records	Live per run	⚡ 2 min
Manual CAROL search	Free	Full database	Manual clicks	🕐 Hours
NTSB data downloads	Free	Bulk CSV files	Monthly updates	🔧 1-2 hours
Third-party safety databases	$200+/mo	Multi-source	Weekly	📋 Onboarding

Pick this Actor when you want filtered, structured NTSB data without navigating the CAROL web interface or parsing bulk download files.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the NTSB Aviation Accident Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Choose a transportation mode, apply filters, and set your max items.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

🛡️ Insurance and Risk Analyze accident frequency by region and aircraft type Assess injury severity distributions for underwriting Track incident trends across time periods Build risk models based on historical data	🔬 Safety Research Study crash patterns to identify systemic risks Analyze probable cause findings across decades Compare injury outcomes by aircraft make and model Build geographic heatmaps of incident locations
📰 Journalism and Investigations Research specific incidents with structured data Find patterns across related accidents Access probable cause findings for reporting Track investigation status updates	🏛️ Regulatory and Compliance Monitor new NTSB findings by transportation mode Track investigation outcomes for policy analysis Study trends in safety recommendations Build compliance reporting dashboards

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Empirical datasets for papers, thesis work, and coursework Longitudinal studies tracking changes across snapshots Reproducible research with cited, versioned data pulls Classroom exercises on data analysis and ethical scraping	🎨 Personal and creative Side projects, portfolio demos, and indie app launches Data visualizations, dashboards, and infographics Content research for bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters Hobbyist collections and personal trackers
🤝 Non-profit and civic Transparency reporting and accountability projects Advocacy campaigns backed by public-interest data Community-run databases for local issues Investigative journalism on public records	🧪 Experimentation Prototype AI and machine-learning pipelines with real data Validate product-market hypotheses before engineering spend Train small domain-specific models on niche corpora Test dashboard concepts with live input

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

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🔌 Automating NTSB Accident Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Set a weekly run to monitor new NTSB investigations as they are added to the database.

🔌 Integrate with any app

NTSB Accident Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications
• Airbyte - Pipe data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more data scrapers and tools.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) or any government agency. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available data is collected.