Yes, Flying in the U.S. Is Safe

Flying has rarely looked as dangerous as it has in the past three weeks. Yesterday, a Delta Airlines jet from Minneapolis flipped over while attempting to land at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, shearing off its wings and tail and spilling jet fuel which ignited outside the plane. Fire crews extinguished the flames and all 80 passengers and crew were safely evacuated, though 18 were injured, two of them critically but not severely enough to endanger their lives.

This comes after one person died and three were injured on Feb. 10 when a private jet attempting a landing at Scottsdale Airport in Arizona collided with a parked plane. That accident followed the Feb. 6 crash of a commuter plane near Nome Alaska that killed all 10 people on board, an accident that itself followed the Jan. 31 crash of a twin-engine Medevac plane in Philadelphia that killed seven people, including one victim on the ground. And all of this was in the wake of the Jan. 29 mid-air collision over the Potomac River near Virginia’s Reagan International Airport, between a commercial jet carrying 64 people and a military helicopter with three on board, claiming all 67 lives.

It’s the Toronto crash that is, of course, getting the most attention today, and for now there is nothing definitive known about the cause of the accident. In a post on X, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said that the Transportation Safety Board of Canada would lead the investigation into the crash and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration was sending investigators to Canada to lend a hand.

“I’ve been in touch with my counterpart in Canada to offer assistance and help with the investigation,” Duffy wrote.

Some of the factors contributing to the crash are already known. In a press conference, Pearson airport fire chief Todd Aitken said, “What we can say is the runway was dry, and there was no crosswind conditions.” 

But that appears not to be the case. Canadian weather reports recorded blowing snow and winds of 32 mph, with gusts up to 40 mph, in the area. And according to Flightradar24, a live flight tracker, those winds were blowing from the west, slamming the incoming jet on its starboard, or right-hand side. What’s more, according to multiple sources, air traffic control warned the pilots of “a slight bump in the glide path” as they came in to land—a likely reference to air turbulence. 

Piloting error may have played a part too. Video of the landing does not show that the jet “flared” on its approach—lifting its nose to expose the wings to more air resistance. “There was no attempt to flare at all, which slows the plane down,” CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, told the news site.

All of that however is for the investigators to sift through. What’s certain is that the recent string of ill fortune makes for a very jumpy public. Plenty of passengers and potential passengers are likely questioning whether their flights are safe or if air travel is facing something of an industry meltdown, due perhaps to understaffing in air traffic control towers, high turnover of pilots, or the mere fact that the U.S. FAA is currently without a permanent administrator. Government officials have hastened to quell any panic.

"Air travel is the safest form of travel in the country. So you can travel and feel good about it on American airplanes," said Duffy during a Feb. 3 interview on Fox News.

There are numbers to back that up. According to the FAA, an average of 45,000 commercial and private flights take off each day in the U.S., carrying 2.9 million passengers across 29 million sq. mi of air space.  For all that, any one person’s odds of dying in an air disaster are vanishingly small—about one in 13.7 million according to a 2024 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (In comparison, the odds of dying in a car accident are 1 in 95.)

Before the Toronto crash, experts told TIME that the four other accidents should not be viewed as a systemic, nationwide problem, but rather as four random events that happened to cluster together in time. “It’s understandable when people see these accidents happen so close together that there's concern,” says Hassan Shahidi, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, an international nonprofit that advocates for keeping the skies safe. “[But] these accidents are all independent of each other. They're all different. They are unique circumstances, and they're being investigated.”

Adds Juan Browne, a commercial pilot and host of the Blancolirio YouTube blog: “Statistically, we’re on average overall for aircraft accidents. [It’s] just that, we've had a couple of bad fatal ones recently, specifically the D.C. mid-air crash. That was the first major fatality we’ve had with a major airliner here in the United States since 2009. [The recent crashes] could be random clustering.” 

Canada had a similar string of good luck going until yesterday. The last major crash at Pearson Airport occurred on Aug. 2, 2005 when a flight from Paris carrying 309 passengers and crew skidded on the runway in bad weather and burst into flames. There were no fatalities.

The Washington disaster, involving two aircraft and more than five dozen victims, is far and away the most complex and the most tragic of the five recent accidents. The investigation into that crash too is still very much ongoing, but the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports that the military helicopter was flying at an altitude of 325 ft., plus or minus 25 ft.—well above its proper ceiling of 200 ft., placing it directly in the landing path of the incoming jet. 

“That only gives 100 ft. of possible error,” says Browne, “and that is just much too tight. We need to separate that traffic out altogether and not allow the helicopters to proceed while the airliners are landing.”

A mistake like that could lay the problem at the feet of air traffic control, but piloting error could also be to blame. The three-person crew of the helicopter included one pilot who was getting a “check ride,” or proficiency test, in the right hand seat. The commanding pilot had about 1,000 hours at the stick, but the officer taking the proficiency test had just 450, according to Browne. 

“So that lack of experience may very well come out to be a factor in the final investigation,” he says. 

The cause of the Medevac crash is not yet known, but the cockpit voice recorder was recovered and sent to the NTSB for investigation. Icing is thought to have been the cause of the Alaska crash, which occurred when the pilot circled while the runway was being cleared of snow. 

The Scottsdale crash was caused by mechanical failure, specifically the collapse of the left main landing gear. Pilot error might have been involved in that too, says Browne. He cites data from an FAA aviation surveillance system that suggests the plane was descending at a speed of 1,600 ft. per minute, well above the 1,000 ft. per minute maximum.

The fact that such different sets of circumstances led to very different kinds of accidents, should provide some reassurance to the flying public, with no connective tissue linking one accident to another. That’s not to say the aviation system couldn’t be safer still.

Browne worries about a steady erosion of experience in commercial aviation—a problem that may not be leading to system-wide breakdowns at the moment, but could in the future. There’s “huge turnover in aviation that’s been exacerbated by things like COVID and early retirements,” he says. “I'm 62 years old. I'm coming up on retirement from the airlines, and I'm joined by thousands of others, and suddenly there's a whole lot of training going on. And it’s not just pilots; I'm talking every aspect of aviation—maintenance, ATC [air traffic control], dispatch.”

In the U.S., Washington bureaucracy may play a role as well. The NTSB investigates accidents and makes recommendations to improve safety in the future. But its authority is only advisory; it’s up to the FAA to heed the suggestions—and sometimes it doesn’t. “Quite often, the NTSB and the FAA are at loggerheads for getting those recommendations implemented,” says Browne.

The FAA could also tighten rules for pilots. U.S. commercial airlines operate under a set of federal aviation regulations known as FAR Part 121—the most stringent set of safety and maintenance rules. Charters for hire operate under looser FAR Part 135 rules. Private pilots flying small planes—so-called general aviation—are governed by the least restrictive regulations, called FAR Part 91. “The accident statistics also kind of follow,” says Browne. “In general aviation, we get overall lack of experience, and it leads to a higher accident rate than certainly that of the airlines.”

None of this, however, changes those one in 13.7 million mortality odds that MIT calculated. Air travel has never been no-risk—but in American skies at least it continues to be low-risk. “We have trained pilots that do their jobs well, trained air traffic controllers that do their jobs well,” says Shahidi. “We have a safe transportation system in this country.”