Since Christmas Day, four commercial jets have crashed, killing nearly 300 people and injured many others. A disastrous image – a Potomac explosion after a Black Hawk helicopter collided with an airplane and an upside down Delta flight on the Toronto runway – people were surprised by their next trip. The US National Traffic Safety Commission report on more than 100 accidents so far in 2025 is useless.
But nonetheless, experts argue that yes, it's safe to fly.
Statistically, thanks to advances in aircraft manufacturing, more sophisticated weather imaging and stricter safety regulations, it is safer to fly than at any point since the 1960s. You can fly twice a day for about 2,500 years before even the small risk of a fatal aviation accident is carried out.
Driving offers an illusion of control, but traveling on roads is far more dangerous than flying. “The chances of getting involved in a fatal car accident at some point in your life are a little less than one in a hundredth. That's about a 1% chance.”
Campbell told Sean Rameswaram I explained today The number of current famous aviation accidents combined with the portrayal of plane crashes on television and films makes the situation worse than the data proves.
“When you're behind the plane, you're not in charge,” Kampel said. “You're in the middle of this complicated system you don't understand. You've seen all of these horrible things that make you fear the worst whenever you feel a slight bump.” That doesn't mean the worst is likely to happen.
But that's not to say the system is perfect.
John Cox has been flying for 55 years and is currently an aviation safety consultant. Cox joined Shawn Lameswaram I explained today To talk about how recent terminations at the Federal Aviation Administration affect aviation safety.
Below is an excerpt from the conversation edited for length and transparency. There's a lot more to the full podcast, so listen I explained today You can get podcasts anywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify and more.
Just as Americans were nervous about getting on a plane, Doge left and eliminated something like 400 jobs from this agency. Can you help me understand some of the jobs I got x?
They reduced the number of radio and radar equipment maintainers. Our system is an old system and requires considerable maintenance. So the biggest concern in the short term is that we have radio or something that fails, thereby limiting the ability of air traffic controllers to accept more flights. A problem appears. It may not be today or tomorrow, but maintenance staff at old radar and radio facilities across the country will be affected.
Our Transport Secretary Sean Duffy says none of these jobs excluded by the FAA are grossly unimportant to safety. And you sound like you agree with him.
Well, there is a definition of a job that is highly safe. Pilots, flight attendants, aircraft maintenance technicians, flight dispatchers – all of these were designated as safety critical jobs, and none of them reduced. An air traffic controller is a safe job. None of them were reduced.
It is true that the maintenance of the equipment used by air traffic control was not considered a critical position for safety. And taking it to the extreme, capacity reductions could mean fewer flights with potentially higher pricing where people have options, but the reliability factor is more on the capacity side than on the safety side.
According to the FAA, we have heard for many years that air traffic control towers have been struggling to staff, with about 2,000 air traffic controllers getting shorter. why is that?
I think hiring and recruiting and recruiting the right candidates was a real challenge as about 50% of candidates didn't achieve that through training. Being an air traffic controller is a very intense and highly trained position. And it takes years to go through the training process and become a full performance level controller.
Currently, most air traffic controllers, or many of them, work six days a week, and if you put them on vacation, you might have got it. And this doesn't happen once, it happens frequently. Therefore, when there were such work-life balance issues, it became more difficult to acquire the best qualified people, part of which was funding.
The FAA fundraising issue dates back decades. If we can take political considerations out and provide a stable source of funding that we say is an important feature, then many of the FAA issues will slowly disappear. You can acquire and hire an air traffic controller. You can update the device. This all takes time. The root of this is steady parliamentary funding for the FAA.
