Methodology & Approach — Uncharted Wires

Why this database exists

Official obstacle data was never designed to capture the wires that matter at low altitude. The registered-obstacle system skews toward tall, permitted structures; the spans that bring down helicopters, agricultural aircraft, and seaplanes are typically low, unregistered, and strung across rivers, valleys, and field boundaries.

The gap is not theoretical. We georeferenced 2,195 NTSB and TSB wire-strike accidents — 559 of them fatal. Of 1,475 US wire-strike accident sites, only 5 had any charted wire within 1,600 feet in the FAA obstacle file. 99.7% of the wires involved in actual wire strikes appeared in no official obstacle data.

Uncharted Wires exists to close that gap: 313,000+ mapped wire crossings and hazards across the United States and Canada, built for low-level decision-support.

What we do

Multi-source reconciliation. No single source sees the whole picture. We draw on more than 305 authoritative sources — utility records, the FAA Digital Obstacle File, HIFLD, NOAA electronic navigational charts, state and provincial GIS programs, and OpenStreetMap — and reconcile them into a single deduplicated layer. Where independent sources agree, that agreement is recorded; a large share of the database is confirmed by more than one source.

Confidence scoring. Every feature carries a confidence rating that reflects the strength and independence of its evidence. Users can see at a glance whether a crossing is multi-source confirmed, single-source reported, or sensor-verified — and weigh it accordingly.

LiDAR validation. This is what separates Uncharted Wires from a database aggregation. We validate conductor positions directly against airborne LiDAR point clouds — USGS 3DEP, NRCan CanElevation, and LidarBC. These are aircraft-flown surveys — not satellite: a plane or helicopter flying a downward laser scanner, dense enough that a conductor shows up as a thread of points suspended in the air above the ground. (Satellite LiDAR is a sparse profiler, far too coarse to resolve an individual wire.) A LiDAR-validated span is not a record that says a wire should be there; it is a wire observed in sensor data. Validation runs continuously, and it works in both directions: it confirms real spans and demotes records the point cloud contradicts.

Accident-history integration. Every mapped feature exists in context with the full georeferenced NTSB/TSB wire-strike record. This join — where the accidents actually happened, measured against what was and wasn't charted — is what allows us to state the scale of the charting gap with precision, and to keep measuring our own coverage against real-world outcomes rather than against other databases.

Pilot reports. Pilots who fly these environments send us confirmations, corrections, and new hazards. Every report is reviewed and reconciled against the existing evidence before anything changes on the map. Ground truth from the cockpit is a source no aggregation can substitute for.

Why you can trust it

Measured against accidents, not databases. Our benchmark is the historical strike record — the most unforgiving test available.
Sensor-verified, not scraped. LiDAR validation means verified conductor positions, not repackaged listings.
Evidence-graded. We tell you how confident we are in every feature, and we would rather demote a record than overstate it.
Continuously maintained. Sources are re-pulled on a regular cadence, pilot reports flow in daily, and validation coverage grows continuously.

What we don't publish

We describe outcomes, not mechanics. How sources are weighted against one another, how confidence is computed, and how the LiDAR-validation pipeline operates are not published — they are the product of years of original work and are what keeps the database's quality defensible.

Uncharted Wires is advisory decision-support data only — not for navigation. Absence of a marker does not mean absence of wires. See Advisory & How to Use.