Whether you’re going on vacation during a holiday, winter, spring, or summer break, chances are you probably want to fly because it’s the fastest method of travel compared to driving or cruising. However, many notable airplane crashes have occurred in the last few months, leaving people to wonder: is traveling by air still safe? I will break these crashes down.
The crashes started on Christmas Day when Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 crashed in Kazakhstan. The plane was an Embraer E190 aircraft. It was trying to land at Grozny Airport in Russia but went around it, abandoning their landing due to bad fog. It crossed the Caspian Sea to enter Kazakhstan airspace. They tried to land at Aktau, Kazakhstan, but got shot down by multiple rounds of shots from a Russian missile, and crashed northwest of the runway. This would start a chain of multiple air crashes in a row in a short period of time.
The next crash happened in Maun, South Korea on December 29, 2024. The flight was Jeju Air flight 2216. It came from Bangkok, Thailand for a routine flight, but the flight suffered a bird strike on short final and performed a belly landing. It skidded down the runway, before crashing into a wall at the end of the runway, causing the second deadliest crash in the aircraft, the Boeing 737. This started concerning everyone as news spread like wildfire, which caused the Aviation industry to be in a downfall.
On the 29th of January, American Airlines flight 5342 was on short final into Reagan International Airport in DC, when an US army helicopter, a UH-60 Blackhawk, collided with the regional jet. The first crash of 2025, left all dead in the crash in the freezing, frigid, and unsurvivable Potomac River. This is when everyone was concerned. Planes go up and planes go down. Simple. But planes shouldn’t be crashing every week!
Then almost right after the Potomac River accident, ANOTHER plane crashed in Pennsylvania, a Med Jets (medical carrier airline that transports sick people to where they need to be) Learjet 55. The cause is still unknown, but sadly and unfortunately, an 11-year-old girl died in the crash.
To end off with all the crashes so far, a Delta airlines CRJ-900 crashed at Toronto International Airport on February 17th. The plane was landing in wind speeds of up to 20-30 knots and wind gusts up to 40 mph. On landing, the plane’s back right gear collapsed, causing the plane’s wing to scrape the ground and flip over. Thankfully, and as a relief to everyone in the plane or watching on the news, everyone survived, with only a few injuries.
And now for the big question. Is air travel still safe after all of these crashes? The simple answer: Yes. The advanced answer: close to 100,000-200,000 flights fly everyday, and there is a 1 in 11 MILLION chance that you are on the flight that crashes or has to divert. The odds of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 816,545,929. That is a 0.000001 percent chance! Studies find that the most dangerous part of a flight is the car ride to the airport. But there you have it. Five crashes. Yet the safest option is still in the sky.