Introduction

The Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) is a repository of voluntary safety related reports submitted by pilots, air traffic controllers, flight attendants, mechanics and dispatchers. Its aim is to collect safety related incidents and suggestions from aviation personal in a confidential manner. The system provides a foundation and learning opportunity for improving aviation safety.

ASRS reports are collected, disseminated and administered by NASA. The reports are public information available from NASA's ASRS website.

This site improves on NASA's by offering convenient search and quick browsing. NASA presents all reports in uppercase abbreviated text, which is difficult to read. This site converts report text back to its normal non-abbreviated upper/lowercase.

Motivation

While NASA's site has the ability to view and search all reports, it lacks a convenient way for casual browsing. Each report has to be explicitly searched for, and then subsequently viewed on a separate page. Furthermore, the reports are in abbreviated uppercase text.

This site provides several methods of browsing including view by month, random, latest, and previous/next buttons (upper-left while viewing a report).

The text is parsed and converted back to mixed upper/lowercase, and where possible, original wording is shown instead of abbreviations

Example:

RPTR PLT UNABLE TO GET IFR CLRNC. AFTER WAITING AN HR AND TWR RPTED NO COM WITH THE CTR, RPTR DEPARTED VFR.

is converted to:

Reporter pilot unable to get IFR clearance. After waiting an hour and tower reported no communication with the center, reporter departed VFR.

Not all "un-abbreviating" is possible as some abbreviations map to multiple words. For example RESTR could be restriction, restrictions, restrict or restricted. It's unfortunate that NASA abbreviates and strips the text of its case. Any computer built in the last 30 years can handle lowercase.

Technical Detail

37000 Feet is written in Java and JavaServer Pages (JSP). BerkeleyDB is used for persistent storage. HTML and CSS are used for page rendering. The site is running on Tomcat and Apache HTTP Server on Linux.

BerkeleyDB was chosen for its fast retrieval speed and minimal resource usage as I'm using a shared Java hosting plan. As fast and simple as BerkeleyDB is, I need to swap it out with a full relational database (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL) for better search capability.

Future enhancements include detailed search, user feedback, voting, and an airport/navaid/waypoint database.

In addition to swapping databases, I may switch to Grails as a web application framework.

Feedback and comments are welcome at the email address below. Thanks for visiting and check back soon for new features.

Steve Kuo
Email address
www.stevekuo.com