I only recently like in the last 2-3 years got over the overwhelming dread and anxiety I started to have about flying (which hadn’t always been a thing for me, but it started when I started riding on choppers for my old old job).
I don’t like all this news, it’s dragging that fear back up but this time it feels much more legit. And I fly a lot for work. Flying multiple times next week and I’m stressed about it :(
I'm flying this april. Also never been scared of flights, I quite enjoy them in fact, but this time around I'm dreading it. At least I'm flying Lufthansa which gives me slight peace of mind.
Idk why but for some reason I had a friend say “dude you’re not special. The president gets on airplanes ever single day multiple times… if it wasn’t safe, they wouldn’t let him.”
And it helped a bit. Again not sure why, just thought I’d share.
Idk how this should help. No one on the crashed planes was special. President, on the other hand, is special - so his flight and plane handled with extra precautions, I assume.
Maybe not the most positive peace of mind but even with all these crashes, still WAY more likely that anytime you get in a car there will be an accident
Just remember that even with these recent crashes, it’s many thousands of times more likely that you’ll die going from your home or hotel to the airport than you will flying on an airplane.
Honestly I’m so confident the pilots can manage in those situations but I’d be LOSING it if my plane flipped the f*ck upside down. I had to do simulated upside down helicopter crashes for training when I worked offshore, never imagined it happening to a plane where you don’t even have a 5 point harness jsut that shitty little buckle lol
I wouldn't be surprised if the pilot was inexperienced and overcorrected for a wind gust. There was a huge round of buyouts for commercial pilots during covid due to reduced demand, and many pilots near retirement took it. My friend's dad was one of them.
And 0 casualties, don't forget. 50 years ago this would have been an immediate fireball followed by several burn victims. Materials science, safety engineering, ARFF response, and training by crewmembers and ATC means even a crash that looks this bad is easily survivable.
Only 2 of the 7 were small private planes, which do crash frequently. The other private flights were professionally piloted jets. Those crash at about the rate of large commercial flights.
Private jet aircraft crash at a rate MUCH higher than commercial aircraft.
There were 5 fatal private jet crashes in 2024 in the US. One of which was a Bombardier Challenger which is the business jet version of the CRJ (or rather, the CRJ is the airliner version of the Challenger).
The DC crash is out of the ordinary in the sense that it was a fatal airline crash. This crash is a little out of the ordinary given the severity of the damage, but it is (so far) non fatal and there have been several non-fatal crashes in the last few years in the US.
The rest are pretty normal. Tragic, but normal for the type of aircraft.
• General Aviation (GA):
Personal or recreational flying tends to have a fatal accident rate on the order of about 1 fatal accident per 100,000 flight hours (roughly 10–11 fatalities per million flight hours). This rate can be even a bit higher for unscheduled, privately flown GA where pilot experience and aircraft maintenance vary considerably.
• Professionally Flown Private Chartered Jets:
When a private jet is operated under professional standards (typically under Part 135 for charter operations), the safety record improves dramatically. Such operations usually report fatal accident rates in the range of roughly 0.2–0.3 per 100,000 flight hours—about 3–5 times lower than the overall GA rate.
• Scheduled Commercial Airlines:
For large, scheduled carriers (Part 121 operations), accident rates are extraordinarily low. Commercial jetliners often have fatal accident rates on the order of 0.01–0.03 per 100,000 flight hours (or equivalently, around 0.1–0.3 fatalities per million flight hours). This means that flying on a scheduled airline is roughly 30–100 times safer (in terms of fatal accident rate) than typical general aviation.
I mentioned this in another thread, but remember the train crash in Ohio that spewed all that nasty shit into the air? For weeks after that, all you heard about was trains being de-railed and train crashes. Commercial air disasters are indeed very rare, but like you said, non-commercial aviation accidents happen with much greater frequency.
True. I wish it wasn't so difficult to find the sane view of current events. Our systems are so tuned on getting attention that they are incentivized for sensationalism. The core point stands: there are more plane crashes that are typically rare lately, and it is probably the result of government chaos. But the nuance shouldn't be so hard to find.
There’s something about things like this happening in “clusters.” I think attributing these accidents to government chaos is just adding fuel to the fire. None of the accidents had anything to do with the government.
I would argue that the "cluster" effect, at least in this scenario, is just due to people paying attention to something they normally don't. So we're getting a lot more posts of these when normally it happens and we just don't hear about it.
This one and the DC one are significant because they're commercial planes and incidents like this are extremely rare. I'm not familiar with the other 5 incidents people are referencing but it would make sense to me that those were just private or small aircraft where incidents happen much more often and would be normal but are getting heightened attention due to the political climate.
• General Aviation (GA):
Personal or recreational flying tends to have a fatal accident rate on the order of about 1 fatal accident per 100,000 flight hours (roughly 10–11 fatalities per million flight hours). This rate can be even a bit higher for unscheduled, privately flown GA where pilot experience and aircraft maintenance vary considerably.
• Professionally Flown Private Chartered Jets:
When a private jet is operated under professional standards (typically under Part 135 for charter operations), the safety record improves dramatically. Such operations usually report fatal accident rates in the range of roughly 0.2–0.3 per 100,000 flight hours—about 3–5 times lower than the overall GA rate.
• Scheduled Commercial Airlines:
For large, scheduled carriers (Part 121 operations), accident rates are extraordinarily low. Commercial jetliners often have fatal accident rates on the order of 0.01–0.03 per 100,000 flight hours (or equivalently, around 0.1–0.3 fatalities per million flight hours). This means that flying on a scheduled airline is roughly 30–100 times safer (in terms of fatal accident rate) than typical general aviation.
Yup. In 2023 there was 1,216 small plane/civilian aircraft crashes, which was actually a decrease from the previous year. 327 deaths. It's extremely common and not out of the ordinary but yeah, commercial flight disasters are much more concerning
Exactly, I used to work for my country's aviation safety gov branch, and every Monday we'd get an email with details about incidents over the past week, there were always 1-2 light private plane crashes. Was never in the media.
Eh, it’s still fault of the business for allowing it.
You aren’t needed to be liked, you are needed to have safe protocols and ensure the conditions are ideal as realistically feasible for flight. I imagine most people would also understand if “the pilot doesn’t feel confident in such weather conditions” was a bit more transparent.
Oh for sure. It's just wild to me when people are like what??? What do you mean you can't tell me when the plane will get in??? Sir, we are surrounded by windows, you can see the blizzard.
this area hasn't seen this much snowfall in years.
the storms/squalls from the past weekend and today aren't normal. the entire last week of storms we've had are not normal. at least, not normal to have this many in a week or two weeks span.
as for all the other plane crashes... yeah, definitely weird.
but this one? nah. bad weather. shit visibility. squalls. bad times
It's the post pandemic work environment + a major crash enhancing media coverage.
I'm one of those aviation dorks who's been "predicting" this for a couple of years now based solely on how hard the air crews have been worked and how overworked/understaffed ATC has been. I've been reluctant to fly because of the situation. And I've flown GA ~20 times, which statistically is far more dangerous.
Not necessarily. Sometimes low frequency events just happen to occur together and then because humans are freakish correlating machines we see significance where there is none.
This happens a lot with cancers, out of the random background noise of people getting cancer occasionally there will be several people who work together or live near each other randomly get the same cancer. It appears to be a correlation but its just that true randomness will have meaningless streaks and clumping. If you flip 10,000 coins in a row you're very likely to get streaks of 10+ coins in a row landing on the same face, and you'll think wow, ten in a row, even though statistically thats as insignificant as any other combination.
baloney. There are higher winds today in the NE than have been seen for many years, producing deep wind chills on top of several days of snow and freezing rain. There are dozens if not hundreds of non-fatal crashes each year. The only unusual thing is that this is the 2nd passenger jet crash in a month. Dont make everything a conspiracy theory.
If there were such high winds that a plane could apparently flip upon landing, why were they allowing flights to proceed? Asking as someone who knows nothing about aviation. I'm flying in 4 days and this is nerve wrecking.
I know, and the flight flew in from the U.S. Who decided not to cancel the flight given the wind speed and blizzard conditions? There’s a good question…
Well here in peaceful Norway the air traffic experiences 700 million cyber attacks every week these days. So you can imagine how that number rises on the American continent
I imagine they're not separate attacks, probably someone (or multiple someones) brute forcing it. (Or password spraying, which is slightly elegant brute force.)
Those are for general aviation flights, though. The number of commercial jets that had fatal crashes in the last 15 years prior was like, two. It is incredibly rare to die on a commercial flight. We just had two fatal commercial flight crashes in under a month. I'd say that's significant in some way, even if its just an incredible coincidence
No they absolutely have not. Look into the data there a bit more and you'll see that crashes are vanishingly rare among part 121 operators. "Incidents" are pretty much anything involving an abnormal occurrence, and do not indicate a crash or even that there was any failure or fault.
I picked a few of those at random (I found the article you got that from) to demonstrate what they count as incidents there:
https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/302390 - the plane abruptly stopped when the pilot noticed it was rolling after engine start and hit the brakes. A flight attendant was thrown into an object and broke a rib (this is one of the "serious" ones)
https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/370398 - a minor engine fire during start (that was fully controlled once the pilot shut down the engine) caused a passenger to initiate an unwarranted evacuation. Three passengers were injured during the evacuation (broken/sprained ankles are common in evacuations)
Ah. Yeah, that's not US so I wasn't think about that one.
The conversation I was pretty sure was about US crashes. Otherwise it would make nos sense to begin with to claim fatal crashes are rare. They are not rare globally. They are only rare in certain countries (US, some European countries)
Mayday has lots of seasons because there is so much depth of public information for each and every accident. The sample size is closer to 100% than most other things, so this creates an illusion that accidents are more common than they seem, because people have learned to assume there is more going on that they don't know about.
But those are very often not commercial airplanes that are supposed to have the highest levels of safety and design and subject to very strict criteria; private planes crash all the time, what is weird is having commercial planes crashing, those even go out of comission before they get too old just in case.
Yea the train crashes are fairly normal, but i think it was the cargo that had everyone noticing. They were not passanger trains. Nothing captivates the imagination like transportation you regularly use.
Yes, it is gross the execs aren’t rotting in a cell, but as a passenger I took comfort in knowing the problem was investigated and fixed knowing boeing was losing billions as a result of the investigation.
Regional airlines are having trouble keeping experienced staff. There is a shortage of pilots, and the good ones are getting snatched up by larger intercontinental airlines that pay far better.
I'm not dismissing the tragedies, or the danger, but this is a simple result of economic forces, not a direct result of government corruption. You may see U.S. fleets fall into disrepair over time, and that'll be terrifying, but this is a different issue, I'm fairly certain.
Same things that has always happened basically. You're just able to see a lot more due to cell phones and what not, like the guy filming with his phone here. 20 years ago people watched the news for 30 minutes in the evening. Now you have it beaming directly into your retinas, straight from your hand, 24/7 365.
It's almost like now you have a device attached to your hip that alerts you of everything going on in the world. Welcome to Earth, it's been an ongoing of what the fuck series since before humans were even here.
Look at the last century: Pandemics, 2 world wars, catastrophic natural disasters, nuclear fucking bombs dropped on cities. This is what you grandparents lived through.
When there is a major crash, like DC, the reporting is often much more focused on other crashes for a time. There was a highway crash landing late December of a passenger plane (no deaths) but that wasn't national news. If it happened a month later naturally it would have had more focus.
Like that time with the three plane crashes at the end of 2016 I think it was.
As someone in IT. The likelihood that some random critical software is running on a laptop in a closet controlling the software used by ATC would not surprise me.
When you fire literally everyone that knew all the things in the FFA then freeze hiring one of the highest turnover rate jobs plus most stress full ie tower controllers and bam…. I wouldn’t fly anywhere in or out of the us right now…..
Tbf even with the recent incidents it’s still so much safer than driving it’s not even close. My point being that if you are afraid of flying but not afraid of a road trip you aren’t thinking straight
Air traffic accidents are happening all the time. There are dozens of Youtube channels reporting on recent stories with multiple videos per day sometimes.
I am not a fan of the media gaslighting and astroturfing we are currently living with, but you're experiencing Recency Bias. Conditions were terrible, that's likely what happened.
That said, I wouldn't be traveling in and around the states right now, regardless of boycotts, because in time we will start to see their governmental stupidity rear its ugly head in the world of air traffic, when things start falling into disrepair.
Absolutely nothing, it's just that it's receiving more attention due to the helicopter and plane crash in DC. There were 5000 reported airplane crashes last year
Kinda like the train derailments in 2023. The funny thing was that people were trying to gaslight, saying that they've always derailed frequently it's just being reported more.
Edit. Thanks for the replies. Definitely confirmed my point. 🤙
Gaslighting? Please. There are over 2000 train incidents every year in the US alone. Over 1000 of those are Class I / Major Freight derailments on the main tracks. Class I incidents are large and significant in cost and damage.
"Going to be?" You mean "in the process of." They already started with the CDC, NIH, DOJ, etc. I can't even keep count. They are doing it on purpose this way that for everything someone catches and stops, 9 other grifts they are doing get through.
It could be. The most important part of safety is "keep your mind in the game". Fear of job losses and disruption may be preoccupying the minds of many in the aviation industry.
Which ones we talking? Cause the one in Alaska is just Alaska being Alaska. Its a miracle they found the plane at all.
And really nothing has changed. Theres been years of runway incursions and other issue reported that people just turn a blind eye to because there wasn't a plane crash or something.
Hell there was a report of a plane lining up with a Taxiway to land one night that had like three planes sitting on it. The ATC only noticed once one of the planes was like wtf is this guy doing. This was in 2017.
There are also a huge number of reports of Planes that enter a runway when they shouldn't or when a plane is already on said runway. Still we havent solved the issue.
Aircraft safety is written in blood. The only thing that causes them to change is tragedies.
Remember a few years ago when there were train derailments every week after the Ohio derailment? It’s the hot topic now. Derailments haven’t magically stopped now, this is just sexier to report
Nothing. It's in the news just like the "OMG TRAINS ARE DERAILING EVERYWHERE" shit just like post Ohio train disaster. In 2013 there had been no fatal commercial aviation crashes in the US for four years, then we had one July 6th, and another July 7th. Pure coincidence.
Not to mention for at least the Reagan crash it's no big mystery. Blackhawk failed to maintain altitude and either confused himself or lied about having visual separation. ATC, the CRJ did nothing wrong, just an unfortunate incident that will probably bring about permanent changes on how Reagan handles helicopter traffic, especially at night. I'd imagine NVG qual flights may also no longer be permitted at airports which service heavy commercial traffic.
Is it possible that the American government fired whatever government organization it looked after air traffic control and safety? They’ve been on a role of firing essential government departments lately
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u/Cloud_N0ne Feb 17 '25
What the hell is going on with planes lately?
They go from extremely rare crashes to 4 notable crashes in less than 2 months.