Atlas/ Insights/ AD / SAIB Density
45,289 ADs · 1,172 SAIBs · top 30 manufacturers
Regulatory pressure, by maker.
Every FAA Airworthiness Directive and Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin attributed to a top-30 manufacturer, plotted as a heatmap from 1994 to 2026. Toggle between absolute volume and per-100-tails normalized rate — Cessna has the most ADs in raw count because Cessna has 77,000+ registered tails. Per-fleet-size is the honest comparison.
Refreshed 2026-04-30 · 475 canonical makes total · top 30 = 81% of volume
| # | Manufacturer | ADs | SAIBs | Fleet | AD+SAIB / 100 tails | Peak year |
|---|
Method.
Sources
FAA Airworthiness Directives (45,289 records, byPair join) and Special Airworthiness Information Bulletins (1,172 records). Fleet sizes from the FAA Aircraft Registry — active tail count per canonical manufacturer.
Canonicalization
Manufacturer names are messy in the source data ("PIPER AIRCRAFT, INC.", "PIPER AIRCRAFT, INC., THE NEW", "CESSNA AIRCRAFT COMPANY, THE"). The ETL collapses common variants onto a short canonical form (PIPER, CESSNA, BEECH, BOEING, AIRBUS, BELL, …) using a hand-maintained alias map.
Cell intensity
Square-root scale — linear scale washes out the long tail and log scale crushes the dominant cells. Square root keeps both legible. Cell tooltips show absolute count + per-100-tails rate.
Caveats
An AD is the FAA naming a known unsafe condition — by design a model with 50 ADs is well-investigated, not necessarily unsafe. Long-lived workhorse types (Cessna 172, Beech Bonanza) accumulate ADs over decades not because they're flawed but because they're flown enough that defects are found.