05-02-2025
Opinion - Is it still safe to fly in the US?
The midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Blackhawk helicopter at Washington Reagan National Airport on Jan. 29 resulted in 67 deaths. If the plane struck by the helicopter had been a larger jet, the number of casualties could have been two or three times larger. Should this incident raise concern about the safety of air travel in general?
To best address this question, one must look at the risks of air travel in general and what the data says about its safety.
Air travel in the U.S. is remarkably safe and has only become safer with time. Much of this can be attributed to the many requirements imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration on aircraft manufacturers, the airlines and within the airspace itself. For example, well defined procedures exist to guide airplanes around inclement weather to achieve the highest safety level.
Prior to the recent collision, the last time that an air crash incident occurred resulting in more than 67 deaths was back in November 2001, when American Airlines flight 587 crashed shortly after takeoff from JFK International airport, causing 265 fatalities. The cause of that crash was determined to be human error by the first officer in setting the airplane's rudder.
After that, crashes in 2009 at Buffalo Niagara International Airport with Colgan flight 3407 and in 2006 at Lexington Blue Grass Airport with Comair flight 5191 led to 50 and 49 deaths, respectively. Pilot errors were determined to be the causes of both of these crashes as well.
There have been other incidents that did not lead to significant fatalities, like Asiana Airlines flight 214 at San Francisco International Airport, when the airplane hit a seawall upon landing, killing three people.
All this data indicate that air travel is remarkably safe, given that the FAA manages over 45,000 flights takeoffs and landings every day, with around 60 percent of these flights on commercial airlines.
Yet when an incident like the recent crash occurs, it shakes our trust in the air system and forces us to question air system safety — even when the data says otherwise.
The larger issue is whether there is something fundamentally different today that would make the last 20-plus years of air travel safety data uninformative.
Over time, excluding the COVID perturbation, the number of air travelers has grown. In 2024, over 900 million people were screened at air security checkpoints by the Transportation Security Administration. That amounts to an average of 2.5 million people per day, with a few days topping 3.0 million travelers (like Dec. 1, 2024).
This demand has resulted in airlines filling their airplanes to near capacity, with load factors routinely over 80 percent. In 2024, Delta filled more than 85 percent of their available seats. To control their revenue stream, airlines have been careful to control their capacity, tilting the economics of supply and demand in their favor. The end result has been record profits.
By controlling capacity, using larger airplanes while limiting the number of flights that they offer, airlines are curbing congestion in the airspace, particularly around high-volume airports in the Northeast and at hub airports around the nation.
Then there is air traffic control. The FAA has struggled to maintain required staffing levels for air traffic controllers. The emotional and physical strain placed on such people is immense, as the lives of thousands of people rest within their control every day.
If there is an area where air traffic control can be enhanced, it is with artificial intelligence. Given the plethora of repetitive tasks that air traffic controllers must executive multiple times per day, a number of such tasks can be offloaded to AI system.
For example, the taxiing of airplanes from the end of a runway after they land to their gate can be overseen with an AI system. Similar movements from their departure gate to the end of the runway for takeoff may also be managed with AI. Such ground operations provide a low-risk way to introduce AI into air traffic control operations.
The number of runway incursions reported by the FAA is concerning, even when they have not resulted in collisions. The good news is that the majority of such incursions are benign, involving airplanes being out of position but not in a direct line of risk.
A midair collision between a commercial airplane and an Army helicopter is unprecedented. Every large high-volume airport today is now on high alert, particularly those that also oversee helicopters. Even large drones can become a risk factor for commercial airplanes.
So is air travel riskier today than it was five, 10 or 20 years ago? The data says that air travel has never been safer. Yet the midair collision at Washington Reagan National suggests that there remains room for improvement. Remarks that DEI contributed to the incident provide nothing more than a distraction from uncovering the facts.
The findings of the National Transportation Safety Board will likely reveal what such improvements should be, and what changes are necessary, either at Washington Reagan National or across the nation's entire airport system.
Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor in computer science in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He used his expertise in risk-based analytics to address problems in public policy.
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