Recently, there have been a lot of airplane accidents.

• July, 17th 2014, Hrabove, Ukraine, Malaysia Airlines, Boeing 777, fatalities 298 (/298)
• July, 23rd 2014, Magong, Taiwan, TransAsia Airways, ATR 72-500, fatalities 47 (/58)
• July, 24th 2014, Aguelhok, Mali, Air Algerie, Mc Donnell Douglas MD-83, fatalities 116 (/116)

It is simple to find a lot of datasets about airplane crashes. For instance on http://ntsb.gov/aviationquery. The dataset is nice, with a lot of information,

> planes=read.table(
+ "cbad3ca6-6b8f-4c98-9ee0-601faAviationData.txt",
+ sep="|",header=TRUE)

for instance the exact location of the crashes,

> library(maps)
> map("world", interior = FALSE)
> points(planes$Longitude,planes$Latitude,
+ pch=19,cex=planes$Total.Fatal.Injuries/50,
+ col="red")

Continue reading The odds of a cluster of airplane accidents →