Ron R. has created something rare on the modern internet: a . It is a reminder that the web was once a place where one person’s obsession could become the world’s reference library.
Let’s be honest: the site is ugly. Beige background. Black text. Blue, un-visited links. No CSS. No mobile responsiveness. In an era of parallax scrolling and glassmorphism, PlaneCrashInfo looks like a Geocities relic. planecrashinfo
If you have ever found yourself down a late-night internet rabbit hole about aviation disasters, you have almost certainly landed on a stark, beige webpage with black Times New Roman text and a table of contents that looks like it was coded in 1997. That site is . Let’s be honest: the site is ugly
Disclaimer: As of 2025, the site remains online but is not actively maintained for new accidents post-2020. Check Aviation Safety Network for the most recent events. Blue, un-visited links
For over two decades, this unassuming, almost deliberately ugly website has been the single most comprehensive, publicly accessible repository of commercial aviation accident data. It is a digital morgue, a historian’s goldmine, and a nervous flyer’s nightmare—all wrapped in HTML that has not been updated since the era of dial-up.
So the next time you find yourself on that beige page, reading the final words of a cockpit voice recorder, remember: you are standing in someone’s life’s work. It is grim. It is flawed. And it is absolutely essential.
The site was founded by , an aviation enthusiast and systems engineer (often cited under the pseudonym "Ron R. from the NYC area"). What began as a personal spreadsheet in the early 1990s—a simple log of notable crashes—grew into a sprawling database. Ron’s stated mission was straightforward: To provide a complete, factual, and respectful record of every commercial airplane accident with a fatality count, from the early days of flight to the present.