Another plane crashed on Monday: Is it safe to fly?

Yahoo

19-02-2025

On Monday, a Delta Air Lines plane crashed and flipped over while attempting to land in Toronto, another in a string of other notable plane crashes that have occurred in the past month. The string of plane crashes has aviation officials working to determine causes, and many travelers to be concerned about safely flying commercially.
Despite the recent crashes, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has assured the American people that flying is still safe.
'Air travel is the safest form of travel in the country. So you can travel and feel good about it on American airplanes,' said Duffy on social media Monday evening, per Time.
According to Time, experts have said that these recent crashes 'should not be viewed as a systemic, nationwide problem, but rather as four random events that happened to cluster together in time.'
All of the recent incidents are completely independent of each other and have all happened under different circumstances. Some may have been caused by piloting errors, or errors from air traffic control while other crashes were caused by weather or mechanical issues, per Time.
Everyday, an average of 45,000 commercial and private flights take off in the U.S., with 2.9 million passengers traveling over 29 million miles of air space, per Time.
The odds of someone dying in an air incident are about 1 in 13.7 million. In comparison, the odds of dying in a car accident are 1 in 95.
The midair collision between a passenger jet and a helicopter in Washington, D.C., was the first major fatality with a major airline in the U.S. since 2009.
The last major crash at Toronto Pearson International Airport was in 2005, when a flight with 309 passengers burst into flames after skidding on the runway. There were no fatalities from that incident, according to Time.
A Delta Air Lines flight from Minneapolis, Minnesota, was attempting to land at the Toronto Pearson International Airport when it flipped over. The crash occurred around 2:45 p.m. local time on Monday, per USA Today.
As it was landing, the plane encountered strong winds and drifting snow. It flipped over on the tarmac and skidded, and when it stopped, the plane was belly up and at least one wing had been torn off, per The New York Times.
The flight had 76 passengers and four crew members on board, and all 80 were accounted for and evacuated from the flight.
There were 18 people who suffered injuries, two of which were in critical but non-life-threatening condition, one of them was airlifted to a trauma center. The other 16 people suffered minor to moderate injuries and were taken to the hospital, according to The New York Times.
Communications between the tower and pilot were normal on approach and it's not clear what went wrong when the plane — a Mitsubishi CRJ-900 made by the Canadian company Bombardier — touched down, The Associated Press reported. Officials reported that 22 of the passengers were Canadian.
Following Monday's crash, the airport was shut down for two hours with all departures and arrivals stopped during that time.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada will lead the investigation, but investigators are being sent from the FAA to assist the Canadian investigators, per Time.
On Jan. 29, a commercial jet suffered a midair collision with a military helicopter over the Potomac River, killing all 67 people on board the plane and helicopter, according to The New York Times.
Just two days later, on Jan. 31, a Medevac plane crashed into the ground Philadelphia, killing seven people, including one person who was on the ground. The crash occurred a minute after the plane took off.
On Feb. 6, a commuter plane in Nome, Alaska, crashed and killed all 10 people on board.
A few days after the incident in Alaska, a private jet attempting to land at the Scottsdale, Arizona, airport crashed into a parked plane. One person was killed and three were injured in the incident, per Time.
According to Axios, the recent plane crashes triggered a spike in searches over how safe it is to fly.
Google searches for 'Is it safe to fly' have been surging since the beginning of February. This Google Trends data goes back to 2004 and the only other time searches for that question were higher was during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Other similar searches, such as 'how many plane crashes in 2025' and 'why are planes crashing,' have also been trending lately, per Axios.