Talk:List of accidents and incidents involving airliners in the United States/Inclusion guidelines

Statement of purpose

What follows is a series of criteria and guidelines that governs the content included on the List of accidents and incidents involving airliners in the United States. These items were developed in order to make clear exactly what items should be included rather what could be included, as well as to determine the best method to consistently convey the most important information about each incident to a reader. As a community effort, these guidelines and criteria exist in a state of perpetual flux that is dependent on participation of contributing editors, whose comments are welcomed in the section dedicated to discussion.

These criteria have been developed in part based on the guideline for inclusion criteria and format of the List of accidents and incidents on commercial aircraft.

Criteria: Article requirement

See also: WP:NOT

Based on the policies outlined at Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, every listing must have a dedicated article on Wikipedia in order to be considered for inclusion on the list. The article must be an article solely about the accident or incident, and cannot be merely a section in a larger article.

• A listing of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 421 meets the criteria, because the linked article is dedicated solely to the crash.

• A listing of 1988 Mexico Learjet 24 crash does not meet the criteria, because there is no link solely about that crash. The previous Wikilink is a redirect to a subsection of the article 1999 South Dakota Learjet crash which discusses similar incidents. Therefore, the crash does not have a dedicated article.

The article in question must not be tagged for notability, nor can it be tagged for a proposed deletion or AFD at the time of nomination. This policy is designed to ensure that the list, though dynamic, does not suffer from Wikilink-rot as non-notable articles are created, added to the list, and then deleted, leaving behind a mess of red linked listings.

Criteria: Location

The List of accidents and incidents involving airliners in the United States was initially a part of the List of accidents and incidents involving airliners by location that was split from the original article due to its large size and increasing unwieldiness in editing. The scope of this list is limited to accidents and incidents on commercial airliners that occurred in the following locations:

• In or over a US state or territory, including overseas territories such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa.
• On or over a US military base or other military territory, if the aircraft involved is a commercial airliner and not military.
• In or over US territorial waters, as well as territorial boundary waters such as the Great Lakes and the Rio Grande.

If the incident occurred in any other location, it should not be included in the list. This includes flights that originated within the United States, but which were not in or over one of the previously mentioned locations when the incident occurred.

• PSA Flight 1771 is an acceptable listing, as it was hijacked in US airspace and crashed in a US state.
• TWA Flight 355 is an acceptable listing, as it was hijacked while en route from New York to Chicago and taken to Canada, Iceland, and France. The incident occurred over US airspace, even though the aircraft ended up in a different country.
• American Airlines Flight 63 (the shoe bomb plot) is not an acceptable listing, as it occurred over international water while en route from France to the US.

Should there be any confusion as to where exactly an incident occurred, or whether a given position entails territorial waters, please discuss the listing on the talk page rather than adding it indiscriminately.

Criteria: Notability

The aviation wiki project has developed a series of notability guidelines for articles related to aviation and aviation accidents. Articles should only be added to this list if they appear to be notable as defined by these guidelines and WP:NOTABLE. Articles that do not meet notability standards run the risk of being deleted, which would lead to red linked articles on the list. Though the list is dynamic, existing listings should be relatively stable, and should not require constant monitoring by editors to ensure that the list remains fully functional.

Generally this criteria only affects newly created articles being added to the list, as they generally have not existed long enough to be reviewed by an established editor. Articles that are tagged with a notability cleanup banner, or which are subject to an active deletion discussion should not be listed either.

Note, however, that should an article be nominated for deletion after its inclusion on the list, it should not be removed unless the article does get deleted.

Criteria: Commercial airliner

This is not an arbitrary list of any old aircraft that happens to crash on American soil. It's not even a list of any non-military aircraft that happens to do so -- it's limited to commercial airliners. That means an airliner carrying fare-paying passengers that is operated by an airline either on a regularly scheduled flight or as a charter. The list should not include any accidents involving business jets, military aircraft, personal aircraft, experimental aircraft, cargo/transport aircraft, or other aircraft (ex. Goodyear blimp), unless they meet the previously mentioned criteria. The only exception is a collision between a commercial airliner and another aircraft.

The US Military Air Transport Service chartered flights with commercial airlines to transport servicemen internationally to and from war zones. Flights such as Pan Am Flight 1104 and Flying Tiger Line Flight 739, which were chartered by and for the military, can be listed as they were operated by a commercial airline as a chartered flight.

Formatting a listing

The listings on the List of accidents and incidents involving airliners in the United States follow a bulleted format that is designed to impart a number of key pieces of information in the most efficient way possible. The minimum information required for a listing is:

• Date of the incident
• Airline and flight number
• Location where the incident occurred
• What exactly happened (ex. hijacking, structural failure, inflight fire, crash)
• A reference
• Casualties (if any)
• Cause (if determined)

The last two bulleted points, casualties and cause, are optional if the flight had no casualties and/or if the exact cause of the accident is still under investigation or undetermined.

Each listing is in the form of one or two complete, grammatically-correct sentences. The wikilink to the main article dedicated to the accident should be bolded. In most cases, the link to the dedicated article should not be piped. Exceptions:

• if the article's title is the common name for the incident rather than the flight number — such as American Airlines Flight 63, the 2001 shoe bomb plot
• two aircraft that collide might only have a single dedicated article, which can either be piped to the word "collision" (or similar) or simply linked only for the plane in question — Northwest Airlines Flight 299 collided with Northwest Airlines Flight 1482

The following should not be used: [[Northwest Airlines]] [[Northwest Airlines Flight 1482|Flight 1482]]. The full "Northwest Airlines Flight 1482" should be linked.

If a very notable person perished in the accident, they may be included in the listing, but they have to be very notable. The listing for the 1943 crash of Pan Am Flight 1104 mentions that among the dead was Rear Admiral Robert Henry English, commander of the U.S. Pacific Submarine Fleet. The listing for American Airlines Flight 1 does not mention the death of W. Alton Jones, oilman, president of CITGO, and influential industrialist. Just because they're notable enough to have their own dedicated Wikipedia article does not make them notable enough to be mentioned in a listing.

A milestone in aviation accidents can also be mentioned. This is information along the lines of "this was the first accident involving a [some type of aircraft]" or "the deadliest aviation accident to occur in California."

If necessary, a third sentence can be included in a listing, if and only if required to convey the basic information listed above. Generally, one or two sentences is sufficient to describe most accidents and incidents.

Do not sensationalize, embellish, or otherwise make a listing more "interesting" to a reader. The list is not some sort of advertisement service for articles, and Wikipedia is not a popularity contest.

Listings are categorized by state or territory. Within each section, listings are alphabetized by airline, and then ordered by flight number. Example: Air Tahoma Flight 185 → American Airlines Flight 63 → American Airlines Flight 383 → Comair Flight 191 → Comair Flight 444.

References

ALL LISTINGS MUST BE REFERENCED. No exceptions. Unreferenced listings will be reverted with extreme prejudice and no warning. Accident investigation reports from official government sources, if available, are greatly preferred over other sources.

• The full text reports of the Civil Aeronautics Board can be found here: link. (Navigate: Historical Aircraft Accident Reports (1934-1965) > Year > Airline).

• The full text of recent NTSB reports can be found on the NTSB website here.

• Older NTSB reports can be found on the Embry-Riddle University website here.

• Airdisaster.com has 432 online NTSB reports from 1967-2002 here.

• The Air Accidents Investigation Branch has United Kingdom reports from 1971 to present here.

• The Singapore Ministry of Transport has a page linking to 17 countries here.

If an accident investigation has not occurred, newspaper reports and other verifiable sources are acceptable for referencing purposes. Only a single reference is necessary, but feel free to add additional ones if you so desire.

Examples

The following are good listings currently included in the list.

• Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 529 crashed near Carrollton, Georgia on August 21, 1995 due to mechanical failure. Nine of the 29 passengers and crew on board eventually died due to injuries suffered in the accident.

• Wien Consolidated Airlines Flight 55 crashed into Pedro Bay, killing all 39 onboard on December 2, 1968 after encountering extreme air turbulence and suffering structural failure. The accident is the third-worst accident involving a Fairchild F-27.

The following is an example of a listing which is three sentences long. It is slightly lengthier than the other listings, but attempts to include the casualty information in the first two sentences proved an awkward task.

• Air Florida Flight 90 crashed in Potomac River in 1982 after hitting 14th Street Bridge in Washington, D.C. shortly after takeoff from Washington National Airport in Arlington County, Virginia, during icy conditions. The captain declined to de-ice the aircraft after waiting on the runway for nearly an hour, causing a fatal buildup of ice on the wings. Four passengers and a flight attendant survive.