...
So we begin by going to the FAA SDR download site.
...
This website is auto-updated by the FAA every SundayMonday morning. All record layouts are identical going back to around 2010 - not a problem, we already have the data going back to about 1974.
...
So to ensure we’re not skipping recently reveiwed reports, we always download the most recent 5 years of data from the FAA site.
Notes:
The FAA does not process any incident older than 5 years back, but there can by "newly posted" data anywhere within that 5 years.
...
We use the Tab-Delimited Zipped Data files from the lower left-hand corner of the download page.
...
Note: Never download from the FIXED WIDTH section of the page, the FAA code introduced an error causing spacing corruption on these files, sometime in 2017
...