The Recent Spate of Plane Crashes Has Many Worried About the State of Air Travel

2025 has gotten off to a fairly nervous start, especially if you're someone who flies all the time. Between a mid-air collision in Washington, D.C. that killed more than 60 people and several other smaller incidents, many people are noticing that there seems to be a lot of plane crash and plane crash-adjacent events happening at the moment.

If you've noticed that spate of news and are wondering what the heck is going on, you're not alone. Here's what we know about why there seem to be so many plane crashes lately.

There's no single explanation for the number of recent aviation-related incidents. What is true, though, is that most of them have happened in the weeks since President Trump took office, and one of his major initiatives involved firing many of the high-level personnel responsible for the safety of air travel. None of these individual incidents can be pinned on this action, but the two have often been framed as related on social media.

What's also true, though, is that air travel remains one of the safest ways to travel. Millions of commercial flights have taken off and landed in the United States, and they obviously don't receive the same kind of wall-to-wall coverage that the devastating accidents do. That's not to say that the accidents are not a tragedy, especially the mid-air collision which was the first one in almost 16 years.

It's definitely possible that leaderless, understaffed agencies where more employees are being encouraged to resign could lead to less safe air travel. We don't have definitive evidence to support that claim, though, and there's no real evidence that the recent spike in air-related mishaps is anything more than an anomaly. For now, then, we aren't even sure if there are more plane crashes than usual.

One underdiscussed element of the plane crash phenomenon is that it's possible that your various social media feeds are feeding you information about various plane-related incidents because you engaged with one in the past, or because it has some other reason to believe that information would be of interest to you. While that's how algorithms are supposed to work, it also might mean that you have a somewhat distorted view of reality.

You aren't getting stories about all the planes that land safely, which can fuel your feeling that there's something unusual about the level of crashes going on. For right now, we don't know for sure whether what's happening is random, or whether it's tied to any specific changes in policy.

What is clear, though, is that the people who work to keep aviation safe do real work, and appointing people who aren't qualified for those jobs, or leaving them vacant, could leave real holes in the system of protections that has made air travel so safe. It might seem like meaningless bureaucracy, but the Federal Aviation Administration exists for a reason.