Advisory & How to Use — Uncharted Wires

ADVISORY ONLY — NOT FOR NAVIGATION

Uncharted Wires is decision-support information for flight planning and hazard awareness. It is not certified aeronautical data and it is not complete. Absence of a marker does not mean absence of wires. No database — including this one — maps every span on the continent. Treat every river crossing, valley, ridge saddle, shoreline, and field edge as if it may be wired until you have visually confirmed otherwise. The pilot in command remains solely responsible for obstacle avoidance, regulatory compliance, and see-and-avoid.

What this data is — and is not

Uncharted Wires maps 313,000+ wire crossings and hazards across the United States and Canada, reconciled from 305+ authoritative sources and validated against airborne LiDAR where coverage allows. It exists because official obstacle data misses most of the wires that matter at low level: of 1,475 US wire-strike accident sites, only 5 had any charted wire within 1,600 feet in the FAA obstacle file.

It is: a planning and briefing layer that shows you known and reported wire hazards along your route, so a span you would otherwise discover on short final shows up the night before.

It is not: a clearance tool, a terrain-avoidance system, a substitute for a recon pass, or proof that an unmarked stretch of water or valley is wire-free.

How pilots should use it

Brief with it, don't navigate by it. Review your route, working area, or landing zone against the map during planning. Note every marked crossing and its confidence level.
Let markers widen your suspicion, not narrow it. A marked span at one end of a lake tells you the lake carries power. Assume the possibility of additional spans nearby that no source has captured.
Use the confidence levels. A LiDAR-validated span is a verified conductor position. A single-source report deserves the same respect in the cockpit — but tells you the evidence is thinner, in both directions.
Recon anyway. For off-airport operations — water landings, ag work, confined areas, backcountry strips — fly the recon profile you would fly with no database at all. Use the data to know where to look harder, never as a reason to look less.
Keep your data current. Wires are built, moved, and removed. Re-download packs periodically rather than relying on an old export.

Data dictionary

Confidence levels

Level	Meaning
LiDAR-validated	Conductor position confirmed in airborne LiDAR point-cloud data (3DEP / CanElevation / LidarBC). Highest confidence.
Multi-source confirmed	The feature appears independently in two or more reconciled sources.
Single-source	Reported by one source (a utility record, government dataset, chart, or mapping community). Real wires are frequently single-source — this grade describes the evidence, not the hazard.
Pilot-reported	Submitted by a pilot and under review or corroborated by observation.

Layer types

Layer	Contents
Wire crossings	Point locations where wires cross water, valleys, roads, or other low-level flight paths — the core hazard layer.
Spans / lines	Linear wire geometry where source data supports it.
Towers & structures	Supporting structures, including MET towers and similar low-level hazards.
Accident sites	Georeferenced NTSB/TSB wire-strike locations (2,195 events, 559 fatal), for context and training.

Formats: interactive web map; per-state/province KML and GeoJSON packs; ForeFlight content packs (map layers plus briefing waypoints).

Report a wire

The most valuable additions to this database come from pilots. If you know a span that isn't on the map, have visually confirmed one that is, or believe a marker is wrong or removed:

Email [email protected] with the location (coordinates or a precise description), what you observed, and roughly when. Photos help. Every report is reviewed and reconciled against existing evidence before the map changes — your report makes the layer better for every pilot who flies behind you.