Only two months in, 2025 has already seen 94 aviation accidents worldwide. There were 63 incidents in January alone, with 31 in February. Overall, there have been at least 117 deaths related to plane crashes in 2025. 14 of those crashes were fatal crashes located in America, causing 84 of those fatalities. Even after all these incidents, the National Transportation Safety Board assures Americans that flying is still safe in the U.S. However, looking deeper into these incidents, we have to ask, is flying worth the risk in 2025?
There were 257 total incidents in 2024–123 in America–so the 94 total incidents in the past month are approaching one-third of the total crashes last year. There were 43 plane crash fatalities in the U.S. overall in 2024, and we have already doubled that in 2025.
Perhaps the biggest and most fatal crash occurred on Jan. 29, 2025, at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in D.C., when American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with the U.S. Army helicopter, the UH-60 Black Hawk, sending both aircraft into the Potomac River in pieces. The collision killed all 64 passengers aboard Flight 5342, as well as the three in the helicopter. This is the deadliest plane crash in America since the events of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Only a few days later, there would be another tragic crash. On the morning of Jan. 31, 2025, a small medical jet crashed into a Philadelphia neighborhood, killing the child patient and the five other passengers inside the aircraft, as well as a pedestrian on the ground.
The following incident would occur on Feb. 6, but rather than a crash, The N321BA Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, a small plane in Alaska carrying 10 passengers, lost speed and altitude and eventually vanished from the radar. There isn’t much information about what happened to the plane, but it was confirmed by the Alaska Department of Public Safety that there were no survivors.
The last two most recent and notable crashes both occurred in Arizona. On Feb. 10, two private jets collided at the Scottsdale Airport in Arizona, injuring four passengers and killing a pedestrian on the ground. This happened when one plane veered on the runway as it landed and collided into another plane on the ramp. The second crash was on Feb. 19, when two single-engine planes collided midair at Marana Regional Airport, Arizona, killing two people.
After reviewing all this information about crashes in America, we can understand why people are on edge about air travel due to increased crashes over the years. Unfortunately, there is so far no reasonable explanation for these incidents. The biggest questions we can ask are: is air travel still safe? If it still is, how can we prevent these tragic accidents from happening on future flights?
