The midair collision on Wednesday night over the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. is the latest in a string of global incidents that have many air travelers on edge.There are believed to be no survivors of the American Airlines crash, which comes on the heels of deadly Jeju Air and Azerbaijan Airlines accidents in December and about a year after an alarming Boeing door panel blowout and a separate fiery runway collision in Japan. And in 2023, a string of near-collisions at U.S. airports spurred the creation of a new independent safety review team.Understandably, anxiety around flying has spiked. So, should passengers be concerned?”I don’t know that passengers should be worried, but I think it’s important for the flying public to be vocal and demand that the government and the different entities do everything possible to make air travel as safe as possible,” said Anthony Brickhouse, a U.S.-based aviation safety expert.But even accounting for serious accidents, “statistically speaking, you’re safer in your flight than you were driving in your car to the airport,” said Brickhouse, who has decades of experience in aerospace engineering, aviation safety and accident investigation.”Air travel remains the safest mode of transportation,” he said.Video below: ‘It’s a little bit eerie’: Travelers react to the plane crash in D.C. An unsettling trendLetting investigators do their jobs to find out what went wrong and advise on what needs to be done differently is essential, Brickhouse said, noting that the investigative body — the National Transportation Safety Board — does not have regulatory authority.The safety recommendations that stem from NTSB investigations must be accepted and implemented by other agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, and they’re not always adopted or can take years to implement. “So that gap definitely needs to be closed,” Brickhouse said.While it’s too soon to know precisely what factors contributed to Wednesday’s tragedy, Brickhouse said he has seen a troubling trend.”When I first got the news, I’ll tell you, I was obviously saddened, but I wasn’t shocked,” he said, pointing to the string of near-collisions at U.S. airports over the past few years.”And in safety, we identify trends… something that happens over and over again. And in the safety world, if you keep having near-misses, eventually you’re going to have a midair (collision),” he said.The series of close calls at U.S. airports in early 2023 prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to create an independent safety review team. Its November 2023 final report cited inconsistent funding, outdated technology, short-staffed air traffic control towers and onerous training requirements among the issues “rendering the current level of safety unsustainable.”The agency announced some immediate action related to hiring and training new air traffic controllers. A longstanding shortage of controllers continues to put strain on US airspace.At the time of Wednesday’s collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, one air traffic controller was working two different tower positions and was handling both local and helicopter traffic, an air traffic control source told CNN. The source described the set-up as not uncommon. However, the New York Times reported that an internal preliminary FAA report says staffing was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.”‘Exceptionally safe’Despite ongoing challenges, the safety statistics are reassuring.”This was an awful aberration but it was an aberration,” says Guy Gratton, associate professor of aviation and the environment at Cranfield University and a commercial pilot in the U.K. and U.S.In its most recent safety report, IATA, the trade association of the world’s airlines, called 2023 “an exceptionally safe year,” with a total of 30 accidents in the commercial aviation sector.Among jet aircraft, there were no fatal accidents or hull losses in 2023, resulting in a “record-low” fatality risk rate of 0.03 per million sectors.”On average a person would have to travel by air every day for 103,239 years to experience a fatal accident,” the report says.One accident in 2023, involving a Yeti Airlines turboprop plane, resulted in 72 fatalities. That marks a decrease from five accidents causing 158 fatalities in 2022.IATA will release its 2024 report in February or March, a spokesperson said.Research sourced by Bloomberg, however, suggests that 2024 was the deadliest year for aviation since 2018. More than 500 people were killed in 2018 in plane crashes, including the Lion Air accident, the first of two crashes caused by problems with the Boeing Max aircraft.IATA said in its 2023 safety report that the industry has improved its overall safety performance by 61% over the last 10 years.A study co-authored by Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, highlights aviation safety’s substantial improvement over many years.The main takeaway is that in the period between 2018 and 2022, the worldwide death risk per boarding was one in 13.7 million. To put that in context, there’s a much higher chance of being killed in a shark attack, or give birth to quadruplets, than to die in a plane crash.That’s also a significant improvement on the 2008 to 2017 period, where the risk was one in 7.9 million, and a dramatic drop compared to the 1968 to 1977 period, where the risk was one death every 350,000 boardings.The past half-century has seen major progress, Barnett says.”We’re now only about 1/38th as likely to die in a plane accident compared to the levels of the late 1960s and 1970s.”Brickhouse is hopeful that this week’s tragedy will bring weaknesses in the current aviation system to light.”And hopefully putting the spotlight and the attention on those weaknesses will give us a good chance to improve in any areas that we need to improve in.”Gratton agrees. “Obviously, the systems broke down,” he says of this week’s crash. While he refuses to speculate on what happened until the official reports are out, he says that within a month, we’ll see the preliminary recommendations for the prevention of future accidents.”Those recommendations will roll out immediately across the USA, and probably some will roll out fairly quickly afterwards across the world — and the simple fact that that happens is why aviation is so safe,” he says.He contrasts aviation’s global response to plane crashes with how other kinds of accidents are viewed in the aftermath.”If there was a road accident outside your home and 20 people killed, would there be a proper report in a year, with recommendations rolled out across the country? No, because it’s nowhere near as robust as the air transportation system, investigating problems, and publishing and using recommendations when anything went wrong. That, fundamentally, is why aviation is so safe.”Learning from mistakesIt’s not all reassuring. Both Gratton and Geoffrey Thomas, editor of aviation website 42,000 Feet and previously the founder of AirlineRatings, the first website to rank airlines by safety, agree that the three fatal commercial accidents of the past month — Jeju Air, Azerbaijan Airlines and now American Airlines — are symbolic of a changing aviation landscape, with more congested skies and expanding war zones.Gratton also says that there’s a question of “normalization of deviance” in the D.C. crash — the idea that people and institutions can essentially start to cut corners instead of playing by the book.”The obvious equivalent is that up until 1912, it was normal to steam at full power through the iceberg fields in the North Atlantic,” he says. After the Titanic sank, this practice stopped.”But it’s 2025, not 1912 — what we should be doing is looking ahead, looking at the near-misses, at statistical probabilities and using that to design what we do,” he says. “When you fail to do that, and continue to carry on with an unsafe practice, we call that normalization of deviance. I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that that happened here.”He doesn’t think a helicopter would have been allowed to be transiting at a low level underneath an aircraft on approach to land at London’s Heathrow Airport, for example.The helicopter corridor that was in use at the time of this week’s mid-air collision has indefinitely been shut down by the FAA, an agency official told CNN.Thomas, meanwhile, has choice words for U.S. politicians.”My view is that the U.S. Congress has consistently starved the FAA of the funding it needs, so the American oversight and air traffic control system is not as good as it could be,” he says. “You often see almost a yearly occurrence where they’re fighting over .”As recently as July 2024, aviation groups urged Congress to cover FAA funding shortfalls.”There’s a blame game now, but the reality is that both Republicans and Democrats have starved the FAA of the funds they need to have the world’s best air traffic control system,” says Thomas. “It’s a great system — this is the first crash since 2009 and the worst since 2001 – but is it the best? No.”Yet they both reiterate that flying is still the safest form of transport.”People tend to think about the flight that’s taking them to their destination as the only flight, but the reality is that there are over 100,000 commercial flights per day around the world so it’s extraordinarily safe,” says Thomas.”Flying is incredibly safe,” says Gratton. “And all the processes put in place over a lot of years to make it as safe as possible are still there.”CNN’s Pete Muntean, Jacopo Prisco, Rebekah Riess and Lex Harvey contributed to this report.
The midair collision on Wednesday night over the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. is the latest in a string of global incidents that have many air travelers on edge.
There are believed to be no survivors of the American Airlines crash, which comes on the heels of deadly Jeju Air and Azerbaijan Airlines accidents in December and about a year after an alarming Boeing door panel blowout and a separate fiery runway collision in Japan. And in 2023, a string of near-collisions at U.S. airports spurred the creation of a new independent safety review team.
Understandably, anxiety around flying has spiked. So, should passengers be concerned?
“I don’t know that passengers should be worried, but I think it’s important for the flying public to be vocal and demand that the government and the different entities do everything possible to make air travel as safe as possible,” said Anthony Brickhouse, a U.S.-based aviation safety expert.
But even accounting for serious accidents, “statistically speaking, you’re safer in your flight than you were driving in your car to the airport,” said Brickhouse, who has decades of experience in aerospace engineering, aviation safety and accident investigation.
“Air travel remains the safest mode of transportation,” he said.
Video below: ‘It’s a little bit eerie’: Travelers react to the plane crash in D.C.
An unsettling trend
Letting investigators do their jobs to find out what went wrong and advise on what needs to be done differently is essential, Brickhouse said, noting that the investigative body — the National Transportation Safety Board — does not have regulatory authority.
The safety recommendations that stem from NTSB investigations must be accepted and implemented by other agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, and they’re not always adopted or can take years to implement. “So that gap definitely needs to be closed,” Brickhouse said.
While it’s too soon to know precisely what factors contributed to Wednesday’s tragedy, Brickhouse said he has seen a troubling trend.
“When I first got the news, I’ll tell you, I was obviously saddened, but I wasn’t shocked,” he said, pointing to the string of near-collisions at U.S. airports over the past few years.
“And in safety, we identify trends… something that happens over and over again. And in the safety world, if you keep having near-misses, eventually you’re going to have a midair (collision),” he said.
The series of close calls at U.S. airports in early 2023 prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to create an independent safety review team. Its November 2023 final report cited inconsistent funding, outdated technology, short-staffed air traffic control towers and onerous training requirements among the issues “rendering the current level of safety unsustainable.”
The agency announced some immediate action related to hiring and training new air traffic controllers. A longstanding shortage of controllers continues to put strain on US airspace.
At the time of Wednesday’s collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, one air traffic controller was working two different tower positions and was handling both local and helicopter traffic, an air traffic control source told CNN. The source described the set-up as not uncommon. However, the New York Times reported that an internal preliminary FAA report says staffing was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.”
‘Exceptionally safe’
Despite ongoing challenges, the safety statistics are reassuring.
“This was an awful aberration but it was an aberration,” says Guy Gratton, associate professor of aviation and the environment at Cranfield University and a commercial pilot in the U.K. and U.S.
In its most recent safety report, IATA, the trade association of the world’s airlines, called 2023 “an exceptionally safe year,” with a total of 30 accidents in the commercial aviation sector.
Among jet aircraft, there were no fatal accidents or hull losses in 2023, resulting in a “record-low” fatality risk rate of 0.03 per million sectors.
“On average a person would have to travel by air every day for 103,239 years to experience a fatal accident,” the report says.
One accident in 2023, involving a Yeti Airlines turboprop plane, resulted in 72 fatalities. That marks a decrease from five accidents causing 158 fatalities in 2022.
IATA will release its 2024 report in February or March, a spokesperson said.
Research sourced by Bloomberg, however, suggests that 2024 was the deadliest year for aviation since 2018. More than 500 people were killed in 2018 in plane crashes, including the Lion Air accident, the first of two crashes caused by problems with the Boeing Max aircraft.
IATA said in its 2023 safety report that the industry has improved its overall safety performance by 61% over the last 10 years.
A study co-authored by Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, highlights aviation safety’s substantial improvement over many years.
The main takeaway is that in the period between 2018 and 2022, the worldwide death risk per boarding was one in 13.7 million. To put that in context, there’s a much higher chance of being killed in a shark attack, or give birth to quadruplets, than to die in a plane crash.
That’s also a significant improvement on the 2008 to 2017 period, where the risk was one in 7.9 million, and a dramatic drop compared to the 1968 to 1977 period, where the risk was one death every 350,000 boardings.
The past half-century has seen major progress, Barnett says.
“We’re now only about 1/38th as likely to die in a plane accident compared to the levels of the late 1960s and 1970s.”
Brickhouse is hopeful that this week’s tragedy will bring weaknesses in the current aviation system to light.
“And hopefully putting the spotlight and the attention on those weaknesses will give us a good chance to improve in any areas that we need to improve in.”
Gratton agrees. “Obviously, the systems broke down,” he says of this week’s crash. While he refuses to speculate on what happened until the official reports are out, he says that within a month, we’ll see the preliminary recommendations for the prevention of future accidents.
“Those recommendations will roll out immediately across the USA, and probably some will roll out fairly quickly afterwards across the world — and the simple fact that that happens is why aviation is so safe,” he says.
He contrasts aviation’s global response to plane crashes with how other kinds of accidents are viewed in the aftermath.
“If there was a road accident outside your home and 20 people killed, would there be a proper report in a year, with recommendations rolled out across the country? No, because it’s nowhere near as robust as the air transportation system, investigating problems, and publishing and using recommendations when anything went wrong. That, fundamentally, is why aviation is so safe.”
Learning from mistakes
It’s not all reassuring. Both Gratton and Geoffrey Thomas, editor of aviation website 42,000 Feet and previously the founder of AirlineRatings, the first website to rank airlines by safety, agree that the three fatal commercial accidents of the past month — Jeju Air, Azerbaijan Airlines and now American Airlines — are symbolic of a changing aviation landscape, with more congested skies and expanding war zones.
Gratton also says that there’s a question of “normalization of deviance” in the D.C. crash — the idea that people and institutions can essentially start to cut corners instead of playing by the book.
“The obvious equivalent is that up until 1912, it was normal to steam at full power through the iceberg fields in the North Atlantic,” he says. After the Titanic sank, this practice stopped.
“But it’s 2025, not 1912 — what we should be doing is looking ahead, looking at the near-misses, at statistical probabilities and using that to design what we do,” he says. “When you fail to do that, and continue to carry on with an unsafe practice, we call that normalization of deviance. I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that that happened here.”
He doesn’t think a helicopter would have been allowed to be transiting at a low level underneath an aircraft on approach to land at London’s Heathrow Airport, for example.
The helicopter corridor that was in use at the time of this week’s mid-air collision has indefinitely been shut down by the FAA, an agency official told CNN.
Thomas, meanwhile, has choice words for U.S. politicians.
“My view is that the U.S. Congress has consistently starved the FAA of the funding it needs, so the American oversight and air traffic control system is not as good as it could be,” he says. “You often see almost a yearly occurrence where they’re fighting over [funding].”
As recently as July 2024, aviation groups urged Congress to cover FAA funding shortfalls.
“There’s a blame game now, but the reality is that both Republicans and Democrats have starved the FAA of the funds they need to have the world’s best air traffic control system,” says Thomas. “It’s a great system — this is the first crash since 2009 and the worst since 2001 – but is it the best? No.”
Yet they both reiterate that flying is still the safest form of transport.
“People tend to think about the flight that’s taking them to their destination as the only flight, but the reality is that there are over 100,000 commercial flights per day around the world so it’s extraordinarily safe,” says Thomas.
“Flying is incredibly safe,” says Gratton. “And all the processes put in place over a lot of years to make it as safe as possible are still there.”
CNN’s Pete Muntean, Jacopo Prisco, Rebekah Riess and Lex Harvey contributed to this report.
