bssunilreddy
Keymaster
What’s the deal with all these airplane crashes?
Don’t worry about air travel — yet.First, let’s lay out the facts. Four commercial jet crashes have occurred in the last 10 weeks: Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 on Christmas Day; Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 on December 29th; American Airlines Flight 5342 on January 29th; and Delta Connection Flight 4819 on February 17th.
There have been several private airplane crashes in the news recently, too, from the air ambulance crash in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, just before the Super Bowl to the mid-air collision in Scottsdale, Arizona, only last week. In fact, data from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) shows that there have been 13 fatal airplane crashes in the United States alone since the beginning of the year, including both private and commercial aviation.
That’s just what is happening in the sky. On the ground, things appear just as chaotic.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced that it was laying off around 400 employees starting on Valentine’s Day, just two weeks after the mid-air collision above Ronald Reagan National Airport. In a combative post on X, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said that all laid-off workers were “probationary” and insisted none were air traffic controllers or “critical safety personnel.”
“The FAA manages the world’s safest and most complex aviation system,” a spokesperson for the agency said. “We are continuously proactive, consistent, and deliberative in executing our responsibilities to the American public.”
A spokesperson for Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS), the union that represents more than 11,000 workers at the FAA, said that the terminations affected 132 of its members, including mechanics, flight operations specialists, and aviation safety assistants.
Dave Spero, the national president of PASS, disputed Duffy’s characterization of the affected employees. “They were critical to the front-line safety people. This destroys the aviation ecosystem.”
It certainly feels like the global aviation system is coming apart at the seams. Every video I watch of the recent crashes makes my brain lurch with primal fear. It’s not normal to see a 20-ton regional jet upside down on an active runway, like a child’s toy thrown aside out of boredom. It’s not normal to watch a medevac airplane plummet nose-first into the ground. It’s not normal to get a text from someone you know who says that the crash at Reagan National was so close that the impact could be heard from their backyard. I’d certainly understand if you decided that, next time you needed to take a trip across the country, you’d pull up the Amtrak website first.
Before you do, let me tell you two seemingly contradictory things about air travel. I can’t promise that they will make you feel better, but I do think they will help you make sense of a bewildering period in modern aviation history.
First, there is the simple matter of statistics. Yes, four commercial airplanes have crashed in the last two months, and three of those crashes have been fatal. Empirically, that’s more crashes than in any other two-month period since 2019. But according to OAG, a leading global aviation data provider, an estimated 6.2 million total flights occurred over that same time period. In other words, even during this period of high relative risk, your chances of a fatal crash were still around 1 in 2 million.
(General aviation, which includes private and corporate flights, is less safe; the accident rate is around 25 times higher than commercial because of less stringent training and maintenance requirements compared to commercial airlines for private pilots.)
But even though we talk about risk in terms of averages and probabilities, reality tends not to be so smooth.
“For any long-term risk, half the time the observed rate will be higher,” says David Spiegel halter, emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge. “We should not expect events to be equally spaced. There will be apparent clusters.”
Over a longer time period, this spike in accidents doesn’t seem so alarming. Between January 2021 and November 2024, only three fatal commercial jet crashes occurred worldwide. The average risk of a fatal crash was 1 per 18 million flights. In 2021, however, there were seven fatal crashes around the world, bumping up the risk profile to 1 in 3.5 million flights, which is closer to the risk over the last two months:
But still a decrease of 97 percent since the 1960s:
In other words, we’re arguing over a risk that is still at 60-year lows even after the recent crashes, and that remains vanishingly small over the course of a human lifetime. If all we had to do was convince our rational mind that flying was safe, these statistics would do it.
Of course, that’s not the challenge.
“Any time the public sees these accidents, they are concerned,” says Hassan Shahidi, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, a non-profit focused on aviation safety research and advocacy. “Is it safe to fly, can I take my family on a trip? It’s understandable.”
The only way to reduce risk to zero is to ground every airplane in the world, Shahidi notes. So instead, he encourages nervous fliers to note that the risk is low, thousands of flights occur every day without incident, and all of these accidents are unrelated. “What happened in Washington with the collision has nothing to do with what happened in Toronto.”
“Any time the public sees these accidents, they are concerned.”
In spite of all the progress we’ve made, however, the aviation safety system remains brittle. As I wrote in 2021, the covid-19 pandemic prompted the early retirement of experienced pilots, mechanics, and flight attendants. Airlines have struggled to backfill these roles as passenger demand has come roaring back, leading to flight delays and service disruptions around the country. And in a field where experience correlates directly with safety — a pilot with more than 5,000 hours of flight time is 57 percent less likely to be involved in a crash, for example — the loss of so many veterans adds some risk back into the system.
The nation’s air traffic control system is under stress, too. Ninety percent of the nation’s air traffic control centres are chronically understaffed, with staff having to regularly work 10-hour shifts six days a week. Meanwhile, more than a third of the IT systems in those centres are in “unsustainable” condition, according to a September 2024 report.
Compared to countries like Canada and the UK, which have successfully modernized their ATC systems over the last two decades, the United States has fallen behind, Shahidi says. The FAA doesn’t expect to address these modernization concerns until at least 2030, owing to a lack of funding from Congress.
Duffy invited Elon Musk’s SpaceX to help “envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system,” and Wired discovered that a cohort of SpaceX engineers are already working at the FAA. At this point, modernization may require some kind of private sector assistance, and public-private partnerships aren’t necessarily a bad thing. A private non-profit called Nav Canada controls Canadian airspace, and according to Shahidi, is one of the best run and most modern systems in the world.
The whole industry has been infected by this penny-pinching, to the detriment of passenger safety. In 2023, the Indian airline IndiGo allegedly instructed its pilots to use an unsafe landing configuration to save money on fuel, which resulted in four tail strike incidents. In Europe, counterfeit parts distributors have sold thousands of inferior engine components to airlines more interested in a good deal than in doing their due diligence. Most egregious of all is Boeing, which installed a piece of cheap, poorly written software on the 737 Max in order to save on design costs; this software caused two crashes in 2018 and 2019, as I recount in my upcoming book.
So don’t worry too much about your next flight, because the skies are as safe as they can be right now. But safety depends on collective action by airlines, manufacturers, regulators, and legislators alike. Each of them is an equally important link in the chain, and if any one of them fails, the whole system will fail, too. Right now, you don’t have to worry that another airplane will randomly fall out of the sky tomorrow.
But in a few years, it’s possible that a bunch of airplanes start crashing for the same reason, because someone decided that pursuing their individual goals was more important than upholding their responsibility to everyone else.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/planes/617438/plane-crash-air-safety-faa-layoffs
