A series of aviation accidents has rattled flyers enough to drag down ticket sales at the start of the year, contributing to lower financial expectations at major US airlines.
And who can blame them? January’s fiery mid-air collision of an American Airlines Group Inc. regional jet and a military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport near Washington, DC, killed 67 people, marking the deadliest major commercial US aviation accident in decades. That was followed in quick succession by at least a half-dozen other aviation mishaps — from crashes to near misses — that put much of the flying public on edge.
Just in the past day, two more incidents have renewed worry about air safety. A passenger jet carrying at least six members of Congress was clipped midday Thursday by another commercial plane on the ground at Reagan National. Hours later, a New York City sightseeing helicopter crashed into the Hudson River, killing all six people on board.
The deadly DC collision “caused a lot of shock among our consumers,” said Ed Bastian, chief executive officer of Delta Air Lines Inc., which suffered its own accident when a plane flipped over in Toronto during a crash landing in February. “There’s a whole generation of people traveling these days that didn’t realize these things can happen.”
Delta and American blamed fallout from those incidents in part for a drop in first-quarter bookings. Social media has been lit up with people wondering if it’s still safe to fly, something many Americans took for granted in recent years.
“I used to tell my friends flying is safer than driving,” Laura Albritton, 54, of Thomasville, Georgia, said in a recent interview. “I hope that’s still true.” The author and documentary director also posted her misgivings on X, formerly Twitter, and said she’s rethinking flying for leisure.
The issue also has assumed political overtones, with critics quick to point fingers at the Trump or Biden administrations for alleged oversight failings. Yet the partisan rhetoric and scary headlines belie a fact that’s startling in its own right: Flying remains one of the safest forms of travel.
The number of accidents has stayed below pre-pandemic levels even as the number of annual flights has rebounded, according to US Department of Transportation statistics through 2023, the latest data available. Fatalities are typically in the single digits each year and serious injuries are rare, though there have been outlier years when large spikes in deaths occurred such as in 2001. And just four months into the year, 2025 is on track to be another deviation from the longer-term trendline.
Experts caution about drawing too many conclusions about the underlying causes of the recent rash of incidents.
“If you travel every day for the next 100 years, your chances of being in a fatal accident is zero,” said Hassan Shahidi, president of the Flight Safety Foundation. “We have thousands of aircraft that take off and land every day without issues. We do have a safe air traffic system and there isn’t anything systemic beneath all of this that is a concern.”
Spring Break Crowds
Plenty of people are still flying, a sign the concern may be both shallow and short-lived. The number of passengers passing through US airport security in the first three weeks of March — a key spring break travel period — was projected to rise 4.9% from a year ago, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
Even so, airline executives are paying close attention to new bookings as the industry approaches the peak summer travel season.
“Marginal flyers are a little shaky getting on a plane,” said Samuel Engel, a senior vice president of ICF Inc. who used to lead the consulting firm’s aviation group. “If there is a salient incident in their mind, they’ll stay home. It doesn’t mean they’ll never fly again, but it means they are too scared to fly this month.”
The Flight Safety Foundation, an independent non-profit based in Alexandria, Virginia, wants to see increased vigilance on the part of industry and government when it comes to abiding by existing regulations, procedures and processes. Its latest annual report, released on Feb. 27, warned of complacency, saying the spate of recent incidents is a “wake-up call that the aviation safety net may be fraying.”
Each of the recent accidents are under investigation by regulatory authorities and it could be as long as two years before definitive assessments are made as to the causes and what could have prevented them. Industry officials and watchdogs alike say there’s no one problem that appears to link these recent incidents or any indication of widespread negligence.
But there are signs of strain on the aviation network — from outdated computers and more crowded skies to high turnover in critical roles.
Air Traffic Control
The Federal Aviation Administration is dealing with a persistent air-traffic controller shortage, with attrition, the Covid-19 pandemic and government shutdowns all contributing to the numbers eroding over time. The FAA has started to make some progress in recent years but overall staffing remains near a 30-year low, Nick Daniels, the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said in written testimony for a hearing last month on Capitol Hill.
In a webcast hosted by the National Business Aviation Association on March 6, Daniels said the agency is still short about 3,600 controllers. That gap has meant controllers at many facilities work overtime — often 10-hour days, six days a week, which can lead to fatigue and burnout, he said.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced a series of changes in February to “supercharge” hiring, including increasing starting salaries by 30% for candidates entering the FAA’s controller academy.
Modernization of equipment, facilities and technology is another key problem — one that Duffy has asked Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to help with. Duffy has said he’s working on a comprehensive plan to modernize the FAA’s air traffic control system that he’s shared with President Donald Trump and soon intends to relay to lawmakers.
Bloomberg was first to report that the FAA was testing the use of SpaceX’s Starlink to upgrade the agency’s aging telecommunications network, which serves as the backbone for the air traffic control system. Musk’s involvement has raised concerns about conflicts of interest, given that he’s still the CEO of SpaceX, which also is directly regulated by the FAA.
“You shouldn’t be scared to get on an airplane, but you should be concerned about the future of our air traffic control system,” said ICF’s Engel. “We are behind on critical investments and we have an unsustainable funding strategy that makes it hard for us to catch up.”
Congested Airspace
The US skies have become more congested over time as a number of new entrants enter the airspace. Private jet ownership and use boomed during the pandemic, and industry officials say it has retained those gains for those well-heeled enough to afford it.
According to the FAA there are now more than 1 million drones registered in the US, a figure projected to as much as triple by 2028. At the same time, the number of space launches has exploded, spurred by the growth of the private space industry. There were 23 US launches in 2014 compared to 144 in 2024 — an increase of more than 525% — according to a database compiled by spaceflight historian and analyst Gunter Krebs.
The US may also soon see air taxis from companies like Joby Aviation Inc. and Archer Aviation Inc., which are waiting for the green light from the FAA to begin commercial operations.
All of these new entrants create more congested skies, adding to the thousands of flights that already occur on a daily basis.
The American-US Army helicopter collision triggered a broad discussion of airspace congestion and an FAA decision to permanently ban certain helicopter operations near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport — in line with NTSB recommendations made on March 11 — to help avoid another collision. Duffy has also said the FAA is conducting a review using AI and other tools to examine other airports with high levels of helicopter traffic.
Younger Pilots
The large number of veteran pilots who took early retirement or moved on to new careers during the pandemic and the subsequent hiring of many regional airline aviators to fill slots at the biggest airlines have led to concerns over the past years about the number of younger pilots filling cockpits.
The issue was raised anew in February, with the disclosure that the first officer in the Delta Toronto crash had been hired by wholly owned regional carrier Endeavor in January 2024 and completed her training in April. The carrier didn’t disclose her flying experience beyond saying she had exceeded mandated minimum requirements set by federal rules.
The average age of active commercial pilots generally has grown slowly to 50.3 years in 2024 from 46 in 2001, according to Federal Aviation Administration data. But federal data shows there are more very young pilots and more close to the mandatory retirement age of 65 — and fewer in between those age groups.
About 5,000 pilots were hired during peak years in the past, but 25,000 were added in 2022 and 2023 following the pandemic, according to Kit Darby, a former airline pilot and flight instructor who now heads an aviation consulting firm.
“If I look at the average, it would look the same, but it’s not the same person,” Darby said. “Then I go back to the military which puts young men and women into our most sophisticated airplanes with several hundred hours experience and they do fine. It’s really the quality of the training.”
Pilots must accrue 1,500 hours of flight experience before they can get the required airline transport pilot certificate, a standard put in place after the 2009 crash of a Colgan Air regional jet that killed 49 passengers and crew and one person on the ground. Another 1,000 hours is necessary before promotion to captain.
Having a higher number of younger captains is not unprecedented, said Jason Ambrosi, president of the Air Line Pilots Association International.
“Our pilots are safer” today because of the training and experience standards that came out of the Colgan crash, he said. “They are all trained to the same standard, all evaluated to the same standard. There is no lesser standard.”
Photo: Photographer: Angus Mordant/Bloomberg
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