Is flying still safe? Here's what experts say

CNN

01-03-2025

This week's close call at Chicago Midway Airport between a Southwest aircraft and a private jet is the latest in a string of incidents that have many air travelers on edge.
In the US alone, it follows the deadly midair collision over the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, a Medevac jet crash in Philadelphia and a regional airline crash off the coast of Nome, Alaska, that killed 10 people.
Recent close calls in February include a Delta flight that made an emergency landing in Atlanta with a haze-filled cabin, and Delta flight 4819 which crash landed, rolled over and ended up resting upside down at Toronto Pearson International Airport in an incident that miraculously claimed no lives.
Those events in North America come on the heels of deadly Jeju Air and Azerbaijan Airlines crashes in December 2024 and about a year after an alarming Boeing door panel blowout in the US and a separate fiery runway collision in Japan.
And in 2023, a string of near-collisions at US 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 US-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.
Letting investigators do their jobs to find out what went wrong and advise on what needs to be done differently is an essential step after a plane crash, Brickhouse said, speaking to CNN after the DC crash, noting that the US 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 the DC 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 US 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 US 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 the January 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.'
Despite ongoing challenges, the safety statistics are reassuring.
The DC crash 'was an awful aberration but it was an aberration,' said Guy Gratton, associate professor of aviation and the environment at Cranfield University and a commercial pilot in the UK and US.
In its 2024 safety report, released in February 2025, IATA, the trade association of the world's airlines, calculated that last year saw one accident for every 880,000 flights — or seven fatal accidents out of 40.6 million flights in 2024. There were 244 onboard fatalities, compared to 72 the previous year. IATA's previous safety report had labeled 2023 'an exceptionally safe year.'
Last year saw 1.13 accidents per million flights according to IATA — up from 2023's 1.09.
But the five-year average from 2020-2024 has improved on the statistics from a decade ago. From 2011-2015 the five-year average was one accident for every 456,000 flights. Now it's one for every 810,000.
Research sourced by Bloomberg, meanwhile, 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 was 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 said.
'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.'
Speaking to CNN after the DC crash, Brickhouse was hopeful that the tragedy would 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 agreed. 'Obviously the systems broke down,' he said of the DC crash, adding that recommendations for the prevention of future accidents will 'roll out immediately across the USA and probably some will roll out fairly quickly afterwards across the world.'
'The simple fact that that happens is why aviation is so safe,' he said.
He contrasted 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.'
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 seeing three recent fatal commercial accidents in the space of a month — those of Jeju Air, Azerbaijan Airlines and 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 DC 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 said. 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 said. '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 [in the DC crash].'
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 the DC crash has subsequently been shut down indefinitely by the FAA, an agency official told CNN.
Thomas, meanwhile, has choice words for US politicians when it comes to the flurry of incidents in North America.
'My view is that the US 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 said, speaking shortly after the DC crash. '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,' said 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,' said Thomas.
'Flying is incredibly safe,' said Gratton. 'And all the processes put in place over a lot of years to make it as safe as possible are still there.'
For those still concerned about flying, you're not alone. Aerophobia — fear of flying — affects more than 25 million adults in the United States, according to the Cleveland Clinic. It's a more severe form of flight anxiety — to be classed as aerophobia, your fear must have interfered with your life for six months or more.
If you're worried about an upcoming flight, canceling it often feels like the simplest solution, but that short-term relief is harmful long-term, Dr. Gail Saltz, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, told CNN.
'Your world just shrunk a little smaller and your fear, being reinforced by this, gets larger,' she said, adding that drinking or taking medication to help with the flight anxiety should also be avoided. Exposure therapy — in other words, taking the flight — is the road to recovery, she said, advising undertaking therapy with a skilled professional.
But taking that flight doesn't mean boarding the plane in blind panic. Saltz says that meditation, progressive muscle relaxation and 10 minutes of paced deep breathing can help calm you onboard. Watching or listening to something, or talking to a travel companion can also help, she said.
Many nervous flyers' fear stems from a lack of knowledge about how things work, and several European airlines aim to address that by running fear of flying courses. Arguably the best known is the day-long Flying with Confidence course run by British Airways, which includes sessions with BA pilots and cabin crew, backed up by a clinical psychologist. The day ends with a real flight operated by the crew who ran the course.
Many other nervous flyers swear by alternative techniques such as hypnotherapy or EFT (tapping). But be reassured: Saltz says that phobias, including aerophobia, are 'very treatable.' It's just a matter of finding out what works for you.
CNN's Pete Muntean, Alexandra Skores, Kristen Rogers, Jacopo Prisco, Rebekah Riess and Lex Harvey contributed to this report.