PlaneCrashInfo is the sort of site the modern web keeps trying to replace with dashboards, map widgets, infinite scroll and six layers of JavaScript. It does not need any of that. It is a hand-built aviation accident database, organized by year and category, with terse records that let the subject matter speak for itself.
The site says its database covers fatal civil and commercial airline accidents, fatal cargo and test flights, major military transport accidents, large helicopter accidents, fatal airship accidents, crashes involving famous people, and other noteworthy incidents. Each record follows a compact format: date, time, location, operator, flight number, route, aircraft type, registration, construction number, people aboard, fatalities, ground deaths and a short summary.
That structure matters. It makes the database useful to researchers without pretending that every event needs an interactive documentary wrapped around it.
The site dates itself to 1997 and its database stretches back to the earliest decades of aviation. The main navigation is gloriously old-Web: Database, 100 Worst, Unusual Accidents, Accident History, Statistics, Last Words, Accident Map, Famous Deaths and references. There is even an offer from the maintainer, Richard Kebabjian, to help look up information on older accidents if visitors provide enough detail.
A database before everything became an app
PlaneCrashInfo is also a good example of how much useful work independent site owners once put online without trying to turn the result into a platform. The database is plain enough that people have scraped it for research projects, while university libraries have linked to it as an open aviation data source.
The site also maintains statistical pages. One analysis breaks fatal accidents into broad primary-cause categories such as pilot error, mechanical failure, weather, sabotage and other causes. Whatever one thinks of simplifying complex accidents into one initiating cause, the important thing is that the methodology and sample criteria are stated rather than hidden behind a chart.
There is a darker reason the site remains useful: aviation accident history is fragmented. Official investigations are often distributed across different national authorities, decades and document systems. A personal database cannot replace primary records from agencies such as the NTSB or ICAO, but it can give researchers a fast starting point and enough identifiers to go hunting for those records.
That is the old web at its best: one person builds the index because the index ought to exist.