Airdisaster.com
AirDisaster.com (colloquially referred to as AD.com) was a website devoted to accidents and incidents on commercial airliners. It included voice recordings, accident videos, reports and articles about a number of airliner crashes. It also included crash statistics by company, plane model and year. The site was started in 1998 by Chris Kilroy. It was last updated on 16 August 2010.
The site also used to host a forum with discussions on air travel related topics varying from Fear of flying to specific well-known disasters like TWA Flight 800 and the September 11, 2001 attacks.[1]
Forums Collapse
On January 17, 2008, the servers hosting the forums crashed, and the owner, Chris Kilroy, stated on a temporary page on the site that he did not intend to reopen the forum portions of the website. Instead of starting the forums back up, users have been urged to take part of the Aviation Safety discussion forums at the sister site of AirDisaster.com, Jetphotos.net. The current forums link on AirDisaster.com points to the Jetphotos.net forums. As a result, an influx of new users have signed up on Jetphotos.net, referring to themselves as 'refugees' from AD.com.
In the days following the server crash, numerous short lived alternative forums were created by AirDisaster.com users, concluding with the establishment of AirDisaster.info, online since February 1, 2008.
Closing Notice
The following is the text of the notice on the AirDisaster.com forum pages after the server crash:
| “ | Dear AirDisaster.Com Forum members,
At about 3pm U.S. Pacific Time today, the web server that hosted the AirDisaster.Com forums suffered a catastrophic failure which rendered both hard drives useless and irrecoverable. Unfortunately, one drive in this server contained the live forums database, and the other contained the daily database backups. With this in mind, I'm sorry to report that, effective immediately, the AirDisaster.Com Discussion Forums are closed permanently. These forums were home to hundreds of thousands of posts, and to attempt to start from scratch at this point would be futile, in my opinion. For those of you looking for a place to continue discussing aviation safety, we have introduced a new Aviation Safety Discussion Forum at our sister site, JetPhotos.Net. While I know this isn't the ideal solution for many of you, I would still invite all of you to visit the JP.Net forums, sign up, and participate! On a personal note, to me, this is the end of an era. These forums were regarded as the most authoritative aviation safety forums on the internet, for a period of almost 10 years. On top of that, they were home to many friendships, some rivalries, and spawned at least one successful marriage. That, above all else, will be the legacy of these forums long after they're gone. I'd like to thank each and every one of you who helped to make the forums as successful as they were, and would like to thank, especially, the administrators, moderators, and industry forum hosts who devoted their free time to make this place the best it could possibly be. I guess that's about it. I hope to see many of you over at the JetPhotos.Net forums, and to those of you who will no longer participate, the best to all of you for a bright and prosperous future. Last one out, hit the lights! Chris Kilroy Editor, AirDisaster.Com |
” |
References
- ↑ "The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Air Traffic Control tape regarding Flight 93". April 12, 2006. Retrieved 2008-01-25.