#23: Aviation is facing a potential hysteria problem

Someone posted last night that there were no plane crashes under Biden. That was the moment I realized truth is fighting a losing battle in aviation.

For the record there were 1,170 aviation accidents in the U.S. in 2024, 1,195 in 2023, 1,259 in 2022 and 1,207 in 2021. This information is available for anyone to find at the very searchable Aviation Accident Database maintained online by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Anyone can open up and read every investigation report. For more in depth investigations, the final report might be hundreds of pages long and include an accompanying docket full of mechanical analysis, company and FAA interviews, etc.

The last passenger airline (Part 121) fatality accident was in 2019 with PenAir flight 3296 at the Dutch Harbor airport in Alaska. One person was killed when the aircraft overran the runway after landing with an excessive tailwind. The last multiple fatality passenger airline crash was Colgan Air flight 3407 in 2009. (You can read the 299 page accident report.) Large air carrier fatality crashes have become quite rare in the U.S. following decades of safety regulations and reform. But they do occur, often for very different reasons¹.

But that’s not what we need to be talking about right now.

We need to discuss how people are reacting to the recent coverage of airplane accidents.

The midair collision over the Potomac was dramatic and shocking. It was a huge loss of life near one of the busiest airports in the country involving both a civilian jet and military helicopter and it seemed impossible to believe that it could just be an accident in such controlled airspace. It didn’t help when President Trump immedately attacked Air Traffic Control at Reagan National suggesting they were inferior employees who were intellectually incapable of the job. Then, when the NTSB began holding press conferences with updates to their investigation and people learned that the airspace around National was complicated by low routes for helicopters, that the Black Hawk crew was on a Night Vision Goggles checkride as well as an annual checkride, that their might be some issue with the Black Hawk’s altimeter (still unclear on what this entailed), then it seemed like while tragic, there would be an understandable explanation of how several things, including National’s recent Congressionally mandated expansion of passenger traffic², combined to create the situation for this accident. By then, however, the Lear jet on the medevac flight crashed in Pennsylvania, the Cessna Caravan on a commuter flight crashed near Nome, Alaska, Vince Neal’s personal jet suffered a landing gear collapse and slid into a parked jet in Arizona and yesterday Delta flight 4819 lost control and rolled after touchdown in Toronto.

At this point there is an impression that we are dealing with an unprecendent plague of aviation accidents in the U.S. orchestrated by Trump and Musk and if you do not agree with that conclusion then you are in league with Trump and Musk and part of the conspiracy to destroy the United States.

By suggesting that there is a level of hysteria to the reactions surrounding the accidents I am certain that people will say I am gaslighting them, I am demanding they deny what is obvious to their own eyes, I am acting like people who insisted Covid was not serious. (All of these charges were directed at me last night on bluesky when about a dozen accounts swarmed in my direction.)

First, I can not believe the Scottsdale crash involving Neal’s jet is even part of this conversation. It’s a privately own aircraft and who knows the last time the landing gear was overhauled. The investigation will determine if the owner was up to date on maintenance, if the shop that maintained the plane did the work they were supposed to do, if a perfectly good part had perhaps become worn down and near the end of its shelf life and thus broke on landing…and on and on. The point is, insisting that aircraft was part of a government plot to undermine aviation safety is no different than saying that someone whose car breaks down on the highway is the fault of the Federal Highway Administration. So, let’s set aside the Scottsdale crash.

Air Ambulance Accidents Are Not New

Turning to Pennsylvania, a lot has been written about air ambulance accidents in the U.S. (Here’s just one report from Cambridge University Press.) When the accident happened on January 31, I was already in the midst of compiling and analyzing 15+ years of data on air ambulance crashes, a project that was spurred by Guardian Flight’s string of accidents. The PA air ambulance crash was dramatic because of its location and thus the damage on the ground. While Guardian’s most recent crash, in 2023 in Nevada, resulted in five deaths and received brief national coverage, it quickly dropped from the news cycle. There was no footage of that crash, it went down in an isolated location and it didn’t happen right after a high profile crash. But forgetting about it, and many others³ before it, doesn’t mean that accident wasn’t serious and didn’t happen. It is a matter of convenience that the long history of air ambulance accidents is dismissed from everyone’s brains right now.

But aside from all that, PA is, for lack of a better word, weird. This is a good article, including comments from another Lear 55 pilot who has flown in and out of that airport, on the many elements of the accident that must be considered. It doesn’t look like weather, it doesn’t look like weight, there is nothing tricky about the airspace, and so I am leaning in the direction of mechanical issue. The wreckage will provide those answers and the “black boxes” will help. But it takes time to sift through all that and, as someone else told me last night, “we shouldn’t have to wait so long to find out what happened in these crashes.”

Well, you have to wait. That’s how investigations get done correctly.

I’m going to bring up Marvel Crosson again

In 1929 Marvel Crosson crashed while racing in the first Women’s Air Derby. The Department of Commerce then oversaw aviation in the U.S. An investigator visited the crash site several days later (after the folks who owned the land had already started clearing it away according to news reports), and looked at the wreckage and said, basically, something went wrong, Marvel panicked, and crashed. We had our quick answer and that was all we ever got. Obviously, that is not good and we shouldn’t want to emulate such terrible investigating.

Now here’s a picture of Marvel (and her brother Joe), because she was awesome.

Fear is Growing and the Current Administration has no Interest or Ability to Stop It

At this point, any accident, no matter how unrelated, is being grouped into a general “Trump and Musk are trying to kill us” conclusion. If this was a capable administration, the Secretary of Transportation and FAA Administrator would be out there talking constantly about what makes these accidents different and how the investigations are being conducted and all the ways in which flying is safe. Instead, the government is firing FAA employees (no one will explain why), and the Secretary of Transportion went to Daytona with Trump. As for the FAA, it seems to be taking a “shelter in place” position on everything right now. (This is my way of saying that they aren’t commenting much or helping in any way.)

What I have found in the past couple of weeks is that if you try to engage with people on these two topics, the specific accidents themselves and the terrible cuts to FAA (and National Weather Service) staffing, and discuss how they are not related, a cadre of folks will immediately call you a liar and a fool and a lot worse. There is no room for discussion about, for example, Alaska’s long history of underfunded infrastructure and accidents. People are delighting in their ignorance and a lot of bad actors (likely living in foreign countries and manning their keyboards like weapons), are overjoyed at the opportunity to make everything worse by amplifying the fear and chaos.

So yeah, that can be pretty darn frustrating for someone who has spent a career learning about this stuff.

The Bottom Line

I’m just going to keep on doing what I do which is write about what causes accidents and how we can learn from them. I’m also writing about the FAA and why it matters to keep it fully funded and staffed. (And I’m blocking a lot of accounts on social media.)

It has now become much harder to write about ways the FAA needs to improve however, because fixing institutional problems is not the point for many people. Even though I agree wholeheartedly that attacking the FAA and its employees is wrong, reporting like mine is seen by a growing number of Americans as part of the problem because it does not blame Trump and Musk for the recent accidents. (Ironically, fans of Trump and Musk also hate my reporting because it supports fully staffing the FAA.)

I very much believe there will be a concerted effort to deny the truth behind any investigations that tell people what they don’t want to hear. If Preliminary Reports come out suggesting something predictable and preventable caused any of these accidents, as they certainly will, I expect people will say the NTSB has been compromised and the reports are lies. (And the New York Times will run a story under the headline “Americans do not believe accident reports; unclear why they came to this conclusion”). I can not accept undermining the work of the NTSB that way, not when accident investigation has been so critical to aviation safety for so long. I am thus resigned to the fact that it’s going to get a lot more difficult to explain what caused a crash, and we are now going to have to combat folks determined, for many different reasons, to deny that facts matter.

Welcome to 2025 in aviation reporting.

1. Please read here about off-duty pilot Dennis Fitch who assisted the crew in the miraculous 1989 landing in Iowa of United Airlines flight 232 where 184 people lived. That story will never be anything other than amazing.

2. Read what Senators Warner and Kaine had to say in 2024 about more flights at Reagan National: “We are deeply frustrated that Committee leadership with jurisdiction over the FAA Reauthorization Act—none of whom represent the capital region—have decided to ignore the flashing red warning light of the recent near collision of two aircraft at DCA and jam even more flights onto the busiest runway in America. It should go without saying that the safety of the traveling public should be a higher priority than the convenience of a few lawmakers who want direct flights home from their preferred airport. We will continue to fight against this ridiculous and dangerous provision.”

3. These are some of the medevac accidents with four or more fatalities in my database: July 4, 2010 in Lubbock, TX (5 killed); August 27, 2014 in Las Cruces, NM (4 killed); December 10, 2015 in McFarland, CA (4 killed); July 29, 2016 in McKinneyville, CA (4 killed); Novebmer 18, 2016 in Elko, NV (4 killed); September 8, 2017 in Hertford, NC (4 killed); December 27, 2021 in El Cajon, CA (4 killed). I am not done compiling data yet, for example I don’t have 2011 or 2018 at all.