STEP 2 Download the FAA data files

The FAA Aircraft registry website is at :

http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry

and the FAA SDR database query site is here

and the public FAA SDR data download site at :

https://av-info.faa.gov/dd_sublevel.asp?Folder=%5CSDRS

August 2022 - NOTE - all tasks listed below can now be handled by the BAT file at

However, its still important to visit the FAA download page (particularly at the beginning of a new year) to ensure all files are available

So we begin by going to the FAA SDR data download site.

This website is auto-updated by the FAA every Monday morning. All record layouts are identical going back to around 2010 - not a problem, we already have the data going back to about 1974.

Each FAA data file is suffixed with either
'a' - Commercial Aviation - or -
'g' - General Aviation.

However, this distinction has no relevance to the upload procedure. We consolidate all the data and process it as one batch.

Additionally, we only import pure TEXT data. We’re not importing photographs or documents during this process. Only TC data from Canadian submitters has photos, attachments, supplemental text etc . .

The FAA accepts SDR reports in a "Preliminary" format. This means it can often take months/years for a given report to finally appear on the FAA ftp website, until such time as the report has been marked "reviewed" by a Technical inspector. They frequently contact the submitter with supplemental questions, and that exchange can take an extended period.

The FAA data files themselves are compiled by Date_of_Occurence_Year, but the entry date of any given record can be current year.

Note: In January of any year, it may take a few weeks for "current year" data to appear on the website. Possibly Contact FAA SDR management if the issue persists into February.

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 only upload new data into WSDRS, we do not update previously imported data

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

So in this example, we would download 10 Tab-Delimited Zip files
sdr2017a.zip sdr2017g.zip
sdr2018a.zip sdr2018g.zip
sdr2019a.zip sdr2019g.zip
sdr2020a.zip sdr2020g.zip
sdr2021a.zip sdr2021g.zip

And save them to C:\data\FAA