US Airmen & UAS Incident Data Spatially Visualized
Gathering the Data
The purpose of this story map is to explore the location of United States registered airmen and Unmanned Aerial Systems pilots spatially on a map. The database that contains this information is freely available on the Federal Aviation Administration website. The database includes columns including unique ID, name, address, region and, medical certification information. The database does not include certification numbers, or the address of those who do not want their address released.
Here is a link to the database: https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/airmen_certification/releasable_airmen_download/
To the right is a map of the Airmen Dataset showing roughly 670,000 points geocoded.
Looking at the distribution of points, it seems as though there are more points in the eastern half of the United States than in the western half. The more mountainous areas around Nevada and certain parts of Colorado, Oregon and Idaho have less points while the west cost states have a similar distribution to the eastern half.
While this map is useful, it is difficult to see clusters and amounts of points in a specific area.
From the airmen dataset, a new more easily understood map of the number of registered airmen per state can be created. When viewing this map it is easy to see that California, Texas, and Florida have the most Airmen.
*Note: This map excludes UAS pilots as they are on a separate upcoming map.
This map is similar to the last one however it shows only UAS Pilots per state. The top three states are again, California, Texas and Florida.
Now that we have seen an overview of the totals of Airmen and UAS pilots per state lets take a look at where Airmen and UAS pilots tend to congregate.
This map is an Optimized Hotspot Analysis showing hotspots and coldspots where Airmen tend to congregate. Looking at the map, hotspots tend to be around large cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Orlando, Dallas, Chicago, Denver, etc.
Continuing from the last map, this map is another Optimized Hotspot Analysis of UAS pilots. Similar to the Airmen Hotspot map, a lot of the same areas are clustered together based on major US cities. A few differences are the hotspots in the center. The figure below shows the Airmen on the left and UAS pilots on the right. As seen in the figure, there are more UAS hotspots than Airmen hotspots in the midwest region.
Now that we have examined the data on the National level, lets focus in and examine a specific case of UAS Pilots and Incidents in California.
This map shows the number of UAS pilots, represented by size of dot, in each California city. The larger the point the more UAS pilots in that city. As one can see, the largest amounts of UAS pilots are located in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.
This map shows the UAS incidents in city. As one can see UAS incidents are largely concentrated in the largely populated areas of Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Bay area, with a string of incidents through the middle of the state. It is unsurprising to see such a spread of incidents considering the placement of large International airports throughout the state.
