Are Plane Crashes Becoming More Frequent?

But, well… is it? Are we seeing more air disasters recently, or are we just giving them more attention? Why would air travel be getting less safe – and are we making the problem better, or worse?

First question: are plane crashes actually up right now?

No. In fact, data from the US’s National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) shows that January and February this year have seen markedly fewer aviation accidents, incidents, and occurrences than in 2024 or 2023.

Despite the spate of recent high-profile incidents, the story told by the statistics remains the same: flying is still, currently, the safest form of travel there is. That’s true to an almost absurd degree, in fact: on your average long-distance voyage, you should be “careful how you make your trip to the airport,” Ismo Aaltonen, formerly Finland’s chief air disaster investigator, told BBC Verify this week, since “that’s the most dangerous part of the trip compared to the actual flight.”

It’s a result that’s indicative of a distinct long-term trend. Between 2005 and 2023, the number of aviation accidents globally fell from 4.4 per million departures to 1.9, according to data from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a UN body which monitors global air incidents. The number of fatalities in commercial aircraft accidents has similarly dropped by a factor of more than 11, from 824 in 2005 to 72 in 2023.

In short: flying has never been safer, and the recent run of high-profile crashes doesn’t change that. 

Traveling by plane “is extraordinarily safe,” Arnold Barnett, professor of statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who also published a study on aviation safety statistics last August, told Conde Nast Traveler last week. “If you see a little kid at a US airport, he or she is five times as likely to grow up to be president of the US as to perish on the forthcoming flight.”

It’s true that the past two months have seen four commercial aircraft crashes – three of them fatal – but as The Verge’s Darryl Campbell points out, that’s four out of some 6.2 million flights that occurred over the same period. Let’s face it: one in more than a million is still pretty good odds of survival.

“Recent incidents will inevitably attract attention and focus on the aviation sector. However, occurrences like this remain almost incalculably rare,” Damien Devlin, a lecturer in aviation management at the University of East London, told The Telegraph last week. 

But, he pointed out, “for perspective, a person would need to travel by air daily for 103,239 years to encounter a fatal accident.”

So why does it feel like planes are crashing more?

There are a few things going on right now that are skewing our perception of plane crash frequency. The first is simple statistics: “For any long-term risk, half the time the observed rate will be higher,” David Spiegelhalter, emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge, told The Verge. “We should not expect events to be equally spaced. There will be apparent clusters.”

In other words: sometimes, shit just happens. You literally can’t be lucky all the time: “If you toss a fair coin repeatedly, you’ll generally get alternation between heads and tails,” Barnett told Conde Nast. “But every now and then, you’re bound to get six heads in a row or seven tails in a row.” 

“When events are rare, as plane crashes with high death tolls now are, it’s [statistically] normal to have long periods without any events interspersed with short spasms with several events,” he explained. “In no meaningful sense are the events really happening more frequently.”

The trouble is, we live in an age of constant and instantaneous news updates – and the grisly images of crashed planes definitely drive clicks. Aviation accidents may have been way more likely back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but our parents and grandparents simply weren’t being fed the thousands of hot takes and photos that we’re exposed to today, increasing our general anxiety around flying.

“These events get overrepresented in the context of social media,” William Brady, an assistant professor of management and organizations and a published researcher on social media at Northwestern University, told Thrillist last year – in the wake of a similar slew of aviation mishaps, in fact. 

“Not only are we seeing this information come from media sources, but we see people in our social network who are sometimes our friends, sometimes just people we’re loosely connected with, but they’re people and they’re retransmitting this information […] it makes us more likely to understand that as something that is common.”

“If you’re a user and you’re looking at these stories, you don’t see how many planes were successful in their flights, which is a lot,” Brady pointed out. “You just see the thing that is [drawing] in your attention, the thing that’s reported, the crashes.” 

So: bad luck, and the rise of social media. Is that all that’s to blame? Well, yes, mostly – but there’s one giant, neon orange confounding variable we’d be remiss to overlook: the recent cuts to the US Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA.

Are plane crashes likely to increase?

Almost immediately, after the fatal January 29 midair crash near the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, social media was flooded with accusations that the disaster was directly caused by the Trump regime’s recent policy choices.

“January 20: FAA director fired; January 21: Air Traffic Controller hiring frozen; January 22: Aviation Safety Advisory Committee disbanded; January 28: Buyout/retirement demand sent to existing employees; January 29: First American mid-air collision in 16 years,” tech and civil rights lawyer T. Greg Doucette summarized in a Bluesky post at the time. “Making America Great Again!”

The timing was certainly suspect – but according to experts at the time, even these changes and reductions were unlikely to have produced such dramatic effects so quickly. 

“The actions by President Trump would not have led to such an immediate impact,” Jim Cardoso, a former US Air Force colonel and pilot and now senior director of the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute, told PolitiFact on January 30.

“All the processes to control and deconflict air traffic in the D.C. area have been well established for a long time,” Cardoso said. “The personnel involved in the accident – air crew from the two aircraft and the [air traffic controllers] in place at the time of the accident – would similarly not have been affected.”

That said – it’s been more than a month since those policy changes now, and we’ve seen hundreds of FAA employees unilaterally laid off in the meantime. Should we expect to see a corresponding change in aviation safety? And, if so, when?

Well, obviously nobody knows the future for sure – but let’s just say the forecast isn’t great. The cuts “certainly [are] not going to improve safety,” Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation safety consultant who was a longtime official at both the FAA and NTSB, told Politico last week. “It can only increase the risk.”

Trump’s officials insist that relatively few people, all probationary – though that doesn’t necessarily mean what it sounds like – were fired, and neither “air traffic controllers nor any professionals who perform safety critical functions were terminated.” But the union representing FAA workers, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS), says that many of those laid off held important roles supporting air traffic controllers, facilities, and technology that keeps aviation safe.

“Air traffic controllers cannot do their work without us,” said one former employee, who spoke to Politico on the condition of anonymity. “To put it frankly, without our team […] pilots would quite literally be flying blind.”

Gulp. Maybe take that overseas vacation sooner rather than later, we guess.