How safe is it to fly?

Air travel is giving passengers plenty of reasons for anxiety this year — with planes catching fire, sliding off runways, bumping each other on the ground or making sudden maneuvers to avoid other aircraft, amid fresh memories of January’s deadly collision in the skies above Washington.

But the biggest dangers facing American air travel are far less obvious, regulators and industry veterans say, including outdated or missing safety technology and staffing shortages that have left air traffic controllers stressed and overworked.

And the main question on many travelers’ minds — is flying really as risky as the barrage of bad news suggests? — is surprisingly hard to answer conclusively because of gaps in publicly available data. That question is taking on new importance as the Federal Aviation Administration embarks on an air traffic control upgrade that the Trump administration estimates could cost as much as $31.5 billion, while seeking to reestablish the United States’ longstanding reputation as the gold standard for air safety.

A POLITICO analysis of data stretching back two decades shows that air travel remains broadly safe — but marked by symptoms of trouble.

“It is still safe to fly. It is still the safest mode of transportation by a large measure,” said former FAA Deputy Administrator Katie Thomson, who left the agency early this year. She called the January disaster an “extremely rare” event — but said it is “a sign of the stresses on the system.”

Before that crash between a passenger jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter, such fatalities in the United States had become almost non-existent, with a total of only three people dying in airline accidents in the U.S. from 2015 through 2024. That’s down from 125 during the preceding decade, according to POLITICO’s analysis of more than 20 years of data from the National Transportation Safety Board.

A more recent improvement has been a sharp drop in near-collisions on runways, which had spiked in 2023 amid a post-pandemic surge in air traffic before plunging last year.

But the number of serious injuries in airline accidents has proven to be a persistent issue, with one flight attendants’ union warning of a recent jump in crew injury rates due to a host of factors including more delays, fatigue and bad weather tied to climate change. And the FAA’s teeming collections of aviation data make it difficult for the public to tell whether some of the incidents that rattle passengers’ nerves are becoming more common or rarer, including tire blowouts and fires.

Looming over all the stats, the 67-person death toll in January’s crash has already made 2025 the deadliest year for airlines in the U.S. in more than two decades.

Regardless of whether that turns out to be an outlier or a harbinger of more dangers to come, a three-day NTSB inquest in July into January’s fatal accident produced plenty of evidence that mounting stresses, subpar safety equipment and a slow federal response to warnings of problems has pushed the U.S. aviation system toward a breaking point.

“Now we have a perfect storm of shortages, of air traffic controllers, technology and infrastructure,” Hassan Shahidi, president and CEO of the nonprofit Flight Safety Foundation, said in an interview earlier this summer.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee’s aviation panel, said at an airport executives’ conference in July that she worries that safety regulators were caught off-guard by what until this year had been more than a decade without a mass-casualty airline crash in the U.S.

“I think because we do have the safest aircraft control system in the world — we’re the global leader in it — there was just this complacency that set in,” said Duckworth, who’s also a former Army helicopter pilot. “If you’re outside the aviation industry, you don’t understand how incredibly complex it is.”

The FAA said in a statement that it has intensified its focus on preventing potential collisions at the nation’s busiest airports, including by using machine learning — a form of artificial intelligence — to identify any risks posed by helicopter traffic in parts of the country. It said it has also increased the installation of equipment designed to warn air traffic controllers if a pilot is approaching the wrong runway or if one is already occupied, among other hazards, while examining traffic flows at two closely spaced airports in California.

“We collect and analyze enormous amounts of data on a daily basis to identify and mitigate trends before they become serious problems,” the agency said.

In May, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy outlined a plan to build a “brand new air traffic control system” that he wants to be up and running before President Donald Trump leaves office. The FAA has also stepped up its hiring of air traffic controllers — though it has also been obeying the White House’s mandate to downsize the rest of the aviation agency’s 46,000-person staff, which is due to shrink 4.5 percent when deferred resignations take effect in September.

The U.S. airline industry’s trade group, Airlines for America, said its members are in regular touch with federal officials and others to tackle safety issues, and will continue to follow the FAA’s guidance “to ensure that aviation remains the safest mode of transportation in the United States and around the world.”

What the numbers say

Mass-fatality air disasters were an all-too-frequent occurrence for U.S. aviation in the decades leading up to the 21st century, whose first year brought the Sept. 11 terror attacks and a 265-death November airline crash in New York City.

Then came a long period of relative quiet punctuated by a handful of serious crashes, including one apiece in 2006 and 2009. But this stretch ended with January’s collision in the skies near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

That crash makes this year the first since 2013 in which more than a single person died in an accident involving at least one airline operating in the U.S., according to POLITICO’s analysis of data on accidents investigated by the NTSB. The last time more than three people died from such accidents in a single year was 2009, when a crash of a regional airline’s turboprop plane near Buffalo, New York, killed 50 people and pushed Congress to toughen safety requirements including for pilot training and fatigue.

During the past two decades, 13 of those years — including last year — saw zero airline accident deaths.

These figures exclude any crashes that only involved aircraft such as small private planes or helicopters.

The respite from mass deaths was no fluke: The FAA and the aviation industry worked hard for their safety record, the safety foundation’s Shahidi said. A major turning point came in the 1990s when regulators and industry created the Commercial Aviation Safety Team — a collaborative group made up of the government, airlines and others — which helped lower fatality rates over the next two decades by systematically investigating accidents and identifying root causes.

By 2008, the fatality rate in U.S. aviation had fallen 83 percent compared with a decade earlier, the FAA has said.

In addition, the 2000s saw a concerted push toward non-punitive data sharing among airlines, aircraft manufacturers, unions and government agencies, which has also helped identify emerging risks.

“That is the power of data sharing,” Shahidi said. “That enabled [the FAA and industry] to really pinpoint those kinds of potential issues and then actually put in place training, technologies to address them.”

On the other hand, the number of airline accidents in the U.S. has shown no similarly significant decline over the past two decades, according to POLITICO’s analysis of NTSB data.

Neither has the number of serious injuries in such accidents, with both 2023 and 2024 having above-average occurrences for this time period. The NTSB defines these injuries as ones involving severe fractures, damage to internal organs, bad burns, hemorrhages or hospitalizations lasting more than 48 hours, among other impacts.

These kinds of injuries can happen during turbulence, or during rough landings. Fifty-six of them occurred in 2013, almost all of which stemmed from a crash landing that July by an Asiana Airlines jet in San Francisco that also left three people dead. Investigators blamed that crash largely on the South Korean airline’s pilots, saying they had mismanaged the landing approach and misunderstood some of the settings on the Boeing 777’s flight computer.

Going around

The months since January’s crash in Washington have also drawn new attention to so-called “go-arounds,” in which a plane on course to land instead pulls away and circles back to try again.

The practice isn’t uncommon, with typical reasons including unfavorable winds, inaccurate air speed calculations or an obstruction on the runway that the pilot needs to avoid.

But after the disaster over the Potomac River, go-arounds have travelers on edge and frequently generate media attention. Recent attention-grabbing incidents include one Feb. 25 at Reagan National, when an air traffic controller told an American Airlines jet to go around to avoid a plane taking off from the same runway. In May, three planes approaching the same airport had to circle back around because of a U.S. Park Police helicopter flying nearby.

These types of incidents rose last year across most of the 30 U.S. airports in major metropolitan areas with the highest volume of traffic, the FAA said in a report earlier this year.

Reagan National, with a cramped airspace in between restricted flight zones over the Pentagon and downtown Washington, ranked by far the worst on that list: Out of every 1,000 arriving flights last year, around nine needed to go around, the FAA reported. That was nearly three times the rate at Washington Dulles International Airport just 25 miles away.

Another worrisome trend appears to have abated, at least for now: near-collisions on runways, including incidents in which a plane crosses in front of another aircraft preparing to land or take off.

The FAA recorded 11 serious and near-catastrophic runway incidents involving at least one commercial aircraft in 2023, more than double the previous year, as both air traffic controllers and airlines faced a surge in travel demand after the end of Covid-19 restrictions. These included an episode in which a FedEx cargo plane came within 100 feet of landing on top of a Southwest Airlines jet taxiing at the Austin, Texas, airport.

The aviation agency convened an urgent safety summit that March and asked pilots and flight crews to “reduce distractions” and to focus afresh on safety basics. The number of these runway incidents fell to two last year. At least two have occurred so far this year, both of which were serious but not near-catastrophic, according to FAA data.

A strained workforce

Glaring weak links remain, however — including shortages of the air traffic controllers who serve on the front lines of aviation safety.

That workforce remains significantly understaffed despite years of efforts to bolster its ranks. The issue has been building since 1981, when then-President Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire 11,000 striking controllers prompted a mass effort to hire replacements — and decades later, created a retirement bubble that the FAA is still dealing with. Many controllers also retired or left the job during the Covid pandemic, worsening the problem.

Last year, the FAA was 3,903 short of hitting its goal of 14,633 top-level controller staff, meaning those who are fully trained and capable of performing the highest level of tasks. Though better than the previous year’s shortfall of 4,040 controllers, progress in filling the gap has been slow. Attrition at the FAA’s controller training academy in Oklahoma City is steep, with a washout rate of 35 percent, Duffy has said. And those who graduate face another two or three years of training before they are fully certified.

Meanwhile, the controllers who are on the job have shouldered the feverish pace of flights. At Reagan National, controllers had warned for years before January’s crash that chronic understaffing and a mounting workload were creating a dangerous situation.

Gaps in public knowledge

The FAA collects huge troves of data from airlines and other entities on many aspects of flights across the country, information that has then fed into efforts by the agency and the NTSB to reduce threats to safety. But the data that’s readily available to the public is sometimes spotty, inconsistently reported or cumbersome to navigate — all of which complicates figuring out whether dangers are multiplying or diminishing.

That includes information on midair near-collisions, which is contained in a public database that the FAA told POLITICO “was last updated in April 2021 due to technical difficulties.” The agency said it is working to fix the issue but offered no specifics about how or what’s wrong with the database.

The data from before that cutoff showed that military aircraft had been involved in nearly a quarter of the more than 8,000 midair near-collisions reported in the U.S. from 1987 to 2021, CBS News reported in March. The incidents have continued to occur since — though without publicly accessible data, it’s hard to tell how frequently.

In 2024, two planes made headlines when a dashcam video appeared to capture them narrowly missing one another as they flew over Syracuse, New York. Similar incidents this year include one last month in which a regional airliner over North Dakota veered suddenly to avoid a B-52 bomber, and one week later in which a Southwest Airlines plane was forced to drop more than 400 feet to avoid a 1950s-era historic fighter jet near Burbank Airport in California.

For several other kinds of incidents — such engine fires, runway overruns, failing tires and serious turbulence — much of the information is contained in two sprawling FAA databases, including one where airlines, aircraft operators and maintenance depots are required to report incidents and major malfunctions. In the second database, those same parties can report incidents to an FAA office that focuses on accidents.

POLITICO found that some events may be mentioned in one of these two databases but not necessarily in both.

The FAA separately publishes data on lithium battery fires and also has a web page of public statements about higher-profile incidents. But not every incident makes that page.

Having enough data available to the public to make a reasoned judgment about safety trends is “kind of the search for the Holy Grail,” said Ed Pierson, executive director of the nonprofit Foundation for Aviation Safety, which collects and publicizes FAA data for public awareness.

Pierson, also a former Boeing senior manager who later became a whistleblower on problems with the company’s 737 MAX, called the FAA’s many databases “very hidden” and “frustrating” to try and unearth for public consumption.

That frustration is shared even within the agency’s own ranks.

Thomson, the former FAA deputy administrator, said the agency has pieced together data in a “fragmented” way for years. “Oftentimes the data across stakeholders — and even within the FAA — isn’t fully integrated, so you get snapshots of risk,” she said.

“The aviation industry has long been a leader in using data to sort of proactively identify and mitigate risk,” Thomson added. Together with the FAA, “it needs to continue that journey to do it faster and better,” she said.