For a project I recently faced the issue of getting a database of all aviation incidents. As I really wanted to try Hadley’s new rvest-package, I thought I will give it a try and share the code with you.

The data of aviation incidents starting in 1919 from the Aviation Safety Network can be found here: http://aviation-safety.net/database/.

First, we needed to install and load the rvest-package, as well as dplyr, which I love for removing lots of messy code (if you are unfamiliar with the piping-operator %>% have a look at this description: http://www.r-statistics.com/2014/08/simpler-r-coding-with-pipes-the-present-and-future-of-the-magrittr-package/)

install.packages("rvest")
install.packages("dplyr")
require("rvest")
require("dplyr")

Let’s try out some functions of rvest.

Say we want to read all incidents that happened in the year 1920: http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Year=1920. We need to find the right html table to download and the link to it, to be more precise, the XPath. This can be done by using “inspect element” (right-click on the table, inspect element, right click on the element in the code and “copy XPath”). In our case the XPath is
“//*[@id=”contentcolumnfull”]/div/table”.
To load the html data to R we can use:

url <- "http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Year=1920"

# load the html code to R
incidents1920 <- url %>% html() 

# filter for the right xpath node
incidents1920 <- incidents1920 %>% 
  html_nodes(xpath = '//*[@id="contentcolumnfull"]/div/table') 

# convert to a data.frame
incidents1920 <- incidents1920 %>% html_table() %>% data.frame()

# or in one go
incidents1920 <- url %>% html() %>% 
  html_nodes(xpath = '//*[@id="contentcolumnfull"]/div/table') %>% 
  html_table() %>% data.frame()

Which gives us a small data.frame of 4 accidents.

But what happens if we have more than one page of data per year? We certainly don’t want to paste everything by hand. Take 1962 for example http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Year=1962, which has 3 pages. Luckily we can get the number of pages by using rvest as well.

We follow the steps above to get the number of pages per year with the XPath “//*[@id=”contentcolumnfull”]/div/div[2]“, with some cleaning we get the maximum pagenumber as:

url <- "http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Year=1962"

pages <- url %>% html() %>%
  html_nodes(xpath = '//*[@id="contentcolumnfull"]/div/div[2]') %>%
  html_text() %>% strsplit(" ") %>% unlist() %>%
  as.numeric() %>% max()

pages
# [1] 3

Now we can write a small loop to get all incidents of 1962, as the link changes with the page number, ie from:
http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Year=1962&lang=&page=1
to
http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Year=1962&lang=&page=2

The code for the loop looks like this:

# initiate empty data.frame, in which we will store the data
dat <- data.frame(date = numeric(0), type = numeric(0), registration = numeric(0),
  operator = numeric(0), fatalities = numeric(0),
  location = numeric(0), category = numeric(0))

# loop through all page numbers
for (page in 1:pages){
  # create the new URL for the current page
  url <- paste0("http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Year=1962&lang=&page=", page)

  # get the html data and convert it to a data.frame
  incidents <- url %>% html() %>%
    html_nodes(xpath = '//*[@id="contentcolumnfull"]/div/table') %>%
    html_table() %>% data.frame()

  # combine the data
  dat <- rbind(dat, incidents)
}

# quick look at the dimensions of the data
dim(dat)
# [1] 211 9

which gives us a data.frame consisting of 211 incidents of the year 1962.

Lastly, we can write a loop to gather the data over multiple years:

# set-up of initial values
startyear <- 1960
endyear <- 1965
url_init <- "http://aviation-safety.net/database/dblist.php?Year="

# initiate empty dataframe, in which we will store the data
dat <- data.frame(date = numeric(0), type = numeric(0), registration = numeric(0),
  operator = numeric(0), fatalities = numeric(0),
  location = numeric(0), category = numeric(0))

for (year in startyear:endyear){
  # get url for this year
  url_year <- paste0(url_init, year)

  # get pages
  pages <- url_year %>% html() %>%
    html_nodes(xpath = '//*[@id="contentcolumnfull"]/div/div[2]') %>%
    html_text() %>% strsplit(" ") %>% unlist() %>%
    as.numeric() %>% max()

  # loop through the pages
  for (page in 1:pages){
    url <- paste0(url_year,"&lang=&page=", page)

    # get the html data and convert it to a data.frame
    incidents <- url %>% html() %>%
      html_nodes(xpath = '//*[@id="contentcolumnfull"]/div/table') %>%
      html_table() %>% data.frame()

    # combine the data
    dat <- rbind(dat, incidents)
  }
}

dim(dat)
# [1] 1268 9

In the years 1960-1965 there are 1.268 recorded aviation incidents, which we can now use in R.