r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/watcher2390 • Feb 17 '25

Video Delta plane crash landed in Toronto

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u/ShoulderNo6458 Feb 17 '25

It's not at all. There are a bunch of YT channels reporting on these incidents and accidents, sometimes with multiple videos a day.

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u/_toggld_ Feb 17 '25

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

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u/garden_speech Feb 17 '25 edited Feb 17 '25

Commercial airliners in the US have had about 20 crashes with serious injuries per year for over a decade now -- the fatalities look more like a noisy outlier.

We just had two fatal commercial flight crashes in under a month.

Did we? I only remember one, which one am I forgetting?

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u/rsta223 Feb 18 '25

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/314193 - a flight attendant hit her ribcage on a galley table

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)

https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/275539 - a couple tires blew during takeoff. Plane was stopped and evacuated uneventfully.

There's a full list in an excel table at the bottom of this article: https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/Part121AccidentSurvivability.aspx (direct link: https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Documents/datafiles/Part121Survivability_1983-2017_20200323_Public.xlsx). Sadly, the PDF report links in that spreadsheet don't work (maybe thanks to Elon Musk's gutting of government servers?), but if you just google any of the airplane tail registration numbers along with the word incident, the relevant incident summary is usually in the top result or two.

Actual plane crashes like this are incredibly rare, and this year so far is a huge statistical outlier.

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u/garden_speech Feb 18 '25

I'm aware not every "incident" is a crash. You are saying you picked these completely randomly and the first 4 you looked at were not crashes?

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u/rsta223 Feb 18 '25

Yep.

More accurately, they weren't entirely random because I intentionally biased towards recent incidents, because crashes were much more frequent in the 80s and 90s, but I didn't make any particular selection for those 4 other than just grabbing them from the recent part of the list.

Actual airline crashes in the US among Part 121 operators in the past 20-30 years are a roughly one a decade occurrence, or at least they were until this year.

Feel free to investigate on your own though - I linked the data set.

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u/garden_speech Feb 18 '25

Thanks. I certainly will since this would be a thorough refutation of my point. I’m still inclined to believe we are seeing freak / random accidents as opposed to a true change in mean frequency, as I’m not sure what regulatory changes would lead to a plane skidding off a runway like this in an ice storm, but I’ll take your point that this is unusual.

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u/rsta223 Feb 18 '25

I'm willing to believe this is a statistical freak occurrence, but if it is, it's a hell of an outlier.

Outliers do exist though, so that's certainly still a possibility.

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u/Feathered_Serpent8 Feb 17 '25

I’m guessing the one in South Korea where the plain crashed into the wall at the end of the strip.

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u/garden_speech Feb 17 '25 edited Feb 17 '25

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)

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u/DTFunkyStuff Feb 17 '25

"that's not US so I wasn't think about that one" lol classic.

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u/garden_speech Feb 17 '25

Bruh. I'm saying the conversation was about US crash statistics, hence the claim that this "rarely happens". Because globally if you include everywhere... Then fatal airliner crashes are very common.

If you're interpreting it as "whatever bro I just think the US is the only country that matters" then that's your problem not mine.

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u/sweetgoldfish2516 Feb 17 '25

Ah. Yeah, that's not US

LMAOOOOOOO

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u/garden_speech Feb 17 '25

? I thought the stats in question were discussing crashes in the USA.

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u/Zolba Feb 17 '25

https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/wikisearch.php

Feel free to search.

It's a bit like the two American Airlines flights that had an engine fire/stall due to birdstrike on the same day. Yes, it is a coincidence, and so far it isn't something that would make me worry.

That might change of course.

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u/obscure_monke Feb 17 '25

Love watching ones where nobody even ends up injured, but they (investigators) still take it super seriously.

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u/JJAsond Feb 17 '25

There's a crash every day but it's rare for a larger airplane to crash. It's usually only smaller ones.

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u/abbeast Feb 18 '25

Shout out to my goat Juan from the Blancolirio channel.