A number of well-documented aircraft safety incidents in recent years, and indeed weeks, have prompted questions over whether flying is becoming more dangerous.
In the first two months of 2025 so far, as well as 142 incidents on private flights in the US, at least eight of which were fatal, there has been a fatal crash over Washington DC, in which a military helicopter hit a commercial American Airlines flight, killing 67 people, plus a Bering Air crash just a week later that killed 10 people, followed by the overturning of a Delta flight on a runway in Toronto.
One of the safest forms of transport
These accidents come after years of high-profile safety problems with Boeing jets, with attention being focused on 346 deaths on two 737 Max crashes in quick succession. Shocking footage saw a gaping hole left by a plug door that had blown out of a plane mid-air, and others involved parts of planes dropping from the sky. That’s in addition to such a high quantity of near misses in the early 2020s, that a special aviation safety summit was called.
Though it might seem that air travel has gone to the dogs, experts say it remains one of the safest forms of transport. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reveals a decrease in air accidents in the US from 2005 to 2024, coinciding with a significant rise in flight numbers. Monitoring from the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) similarly shows a decline in accidents per million plane departures worldwide over the same period.
The least amount of plane crashes we’ve ever had in a month happened this January since we started collecting Data in 1982
— Michael (@earlofthetards) February 25, 2025
Yet people think there is some sort of catastrophe happening
If you don’t know why every plane crash is being reported you are retarded and I’m claiming… pic.twitter.com/La9ZccuoM8
Some highlight perceived problems with air traffic control worker numbers and systems, which have seen heavy improvement efforts by former US Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg and are now seeing controversial intervention by the Trump administration and Elon Musk. But there may in fact be no logical connection at all between the recent incidents.
Random events do not occur evenly – they tend to cluster.
Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge
Speaking to the BBC, Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, pointed out that “Random events do not occur evenly – they tend to cluster. So unfortunately, we can expect aircraft accidents to be appear to be connected, even when they are not.” He also noted that accounting methods that look at fatalities make air safety data overly “sensitive to a large single accident.”
That lack of relationship between different aviation incidents is also something mentioned by Ismo Aaltonen, Finland’s ex-chief air disaster investigator, who said: “It’s very unlucky that we had this period of many different kind of accidents, but … they are such different cases.” His point is illustrated by various high-profile accidents with completely different causes, such as the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 with 239 people on board and the shooting down of the 300 people on board Malaysian Airlines plane MH17 by a Russian missile over eastern Ukraine. The 2015 crash of Germanwings 9525 into the French Alps that was later linked to the pilot’s mental health could also to be bundled into these almost freak scenarios.
Though human perception of risk does not align with reality, the fact remains that January 2025 saw a record low for US accidents, with eight fewer than the prior record low of 70 back in January 2012. And CNN reports that over the last decade and a half there have been fewer fatalities on scheduled commercial aircraft than during any other 15-year period.
Indeed, despite recent tragedies, the only three years with fewer than 300 deadly accidents have all occurred since 2020. Looking back to the early 1980s, when there were over 600 fatal aircraft crashes, the improvement is clear. Whether that record will be maintained as the US federal aviation workforce comes under unprecedented pressure from the Trump administration, remains to be seen.
