The National Transportation Safety Board keeps the public record of US civil aviation accidents and incidents. It is free, it is thorough, and it is genuinely one of the better public safety datasets anywhere. It is also split across several files, and that split is where most searches quietly go wrong.
The two ways in
1. The web search
The NTSB's public query tool, CAROL, searches investigations from a browser. It is the right starting point: type a registration number and you get the matching investigations, with narratives and docket material for the ones that have them.
Coverage of older events through the web tool has changed over the years, so do not assume that "no results" means "no accidents". Test it: search a registration you already know had an old accident and see whether it comes back.
2. The downloadable archives
This is the part almost nobody looks at. The NTSB publishes the accident census as Microsoft Access database files in a download directory, and it is not one file — it is several, each covering a different era:
- PRE1982.zip — described by the NTSB as covering 1962 through 1981.
- Pre2008.zip — a 155 MB archive, last stamped August 2023. It holds 63,002 events dated 1982 through 2007.
- avall.zip — the current file, refreshed constantly. The NTSB's data page describes it as covering "1982 to the present".
- Plus a long series of small incremental update files, published several times a month.
Here is the trap. Those descriptions overlap, so it is natural to assume the current file is a superset and the older archives are redundant. We checked, by loading them. In the copy of the current file published in July 2026, the earliest events are from 2008. The twenty-six years from 1982 to 2007 — 63,002 events — are only in the separate archive.
So anyone who ingested the obvious file and stopped there, which is most tools and most hobby projects, is searching about a third of the record and does not know it.
Why this matters for a specific airplane
General aviation airframes last a long time. The median light single flying today was built in the 1970s. An airplane like that has had five decades to have a bad day, and the majority of that lifetime falls before 2008.
Concretely: a 1978 Cessna that was substantially damaged in 1994 is a completely ordinary situation. If your accident search starts at 2008, that airplane looks like it has a spotless record.
Search by serial number too
Whichever route you take, run the search twice: once on the registration, and once on the manufacturer's serial number. Tail numbers change; serial numbers do not. An airframe that was wrecked, rebuilt, and re-registered under a new N-number only shows up under the number it wore on the day of the accident — and under its serial.
One caution when you do it by hand: serial numbers are only unique within a manufacturer. Serial "980" exists at more than one aircraft company. Always confirm the manufacturer matches before you treat a serial hit as the same airplane.
What "no record" is worth
An accident only enters this database if it was reported to the NTSB and met the reporting threshold. Plenty of significant damage — a hangar rash, a hard landing repaired quietly, a taxiing collision — never generates an NTSB record at all. A clean search is genuinely good news. It is not a guarantee, and anyone who sells it to you as one is overselling.