Summary
A new AP-NORC poll shows that Americans’ confidence in air travel has declined after several fatal plane crashes in 2025.
Only 64% now believe flying is safe, down from 71% last year, while the number of those who feel it is unsafe rose by 12%.
Confidence in pilots, air traffic controllers, and the federal government has also dropped. Recent crashes, including a deadly collision over Washington, D.C., have fueled public concern.
Meanwhile, Trump has begun firing hundreds of FAA employees, raising further safety worries.
So weird that it’s only fallen 7% considering before January 2025 we hadn’t had a fatal plane crash in almost 16 years, and now we’ve had multiple in a month.
I’m not flying anywhere while the orange turd is in office. Fuck it, less money for the economy I guess. U wanna fire air traffic controllers while there is an active shortage? Planes crashing left and right ever since. Hard pass.
Added with Trump firing faa employees
Flying is still the safest form of transport.
There’s 1.17 deaths and 42 injuries per 100 million miles travelled by car. In comparison, there’s only 0.007 injuries per 100 million miles flown in commercial planes. Even trains are more dangerous at 0.1 injuries per 100 million miles.
You’re far, far more likely to be in a car crash on your way to the airport compared to being involved in a plane crash.
Dying in a car crash takes so many forms. Instantly crushed by a truck? Or die slowly in the hospital?
But i imagine dying in an airplane almost always involves 20mins of sheer terror as you plummet towards the earth knowing that you will die, or if you might survive and be floating in the ocean for days.
You spitting some real pre-2025 numbers unless the only car you’re including is a cyber truck
Of course they’re pre 2025… It’s only February so there’s no full year stats for 2025 yet.
These stats reflect years of institutional intervention from the FAA and NTSB. With alterations to those regulators its unlikely these stats will continue to be relevant.
Even if flying gets a bit less safe, there would have to be far, far more plane crashes (at least three orders of magnitude more) for it to become anywhere near as dangerous as driving.
It also ignores how hard it is to be a pilot or a train conductor vs driving a car around town. Got an easy to obtain license and some cash and you’re golden. Try to do that with a plane or train. Takes some serious education in comparison
This is a reason why people should feel safer taking a plane or train, which is my point.
Just getting us peasants prepared to not have air travel available to us.
This is funny to me because the amount of commerce in the U.S. that is dependent on reliable air travel for average Americans is massive. If people stop flying the economy is going to be what ends up in freefall.
I fly Sunday. I’m not worried.
The odds are still greatly in your favor, there’s little to worry about.
That said, the odds are now drastically worse than they were prior.
It’d still be a higher probability to die in the car taking them to the airport.
Indeed, but if we keep accelerating at this pace for a couple of years…
Well you wouldn’t be driving to the airport if you didn’t have a flight to catch! ** taps forehead
I really don’t think we hold any industry to the superhuman standards we hold aviation to.
The only other industry that individuals entrust their lives to in large numbers that I can think of is the medical industry, and that kills around 100k people a year, yet people don’t quit seeking treatment en masse (problems with US medical system access and affordability aside).
Pilots are tested at least yearly with simulators dealing with emergencies of all sorts, from fires to engine failures, education and reviews of aircraft systems and aviation regulations, along with medical examinations and random drug testing to continually check fitness for flight. Cabin crew also see yearly testing dealing with emergencies, medical or things like fires in the cabin, evacuations, along with training on how to deal with passengers who may be drunk or a threat in some way.
The best time to fly is after incidents. Everyone is on high alert, training departments and unions remind crews to take extra care in their duties, all crews are aware of extra scrutiny.
You’re mostly right, but your comment also assumes independent probabilities rather than correlated probabilities of danger. Sometimes multiple crashes can trace back to the same cause: one particular manufacturing defect on a model of aircraft sold thousands of times, one bad practice on air traffic control procedure, one bad actor targeting multiple aircraft, etc.
Purely hypothetically, as an example, if it turned out that there was a terrorist group targeting aircraft via anti aircraft missiles, then that group’s success at bringing down an airliner would actually worsen the odds of passengers on other aircraft, at least until we receive external information that the threat has passed.
One bad actor causing chaos amongst the staff entrusted with keeping airlines safe….
Exactly. Some of the fears that people have are about factors that affect all flights, not just the risk of a single pilot operating a single aircraft.
Flying is still safe and has a strong safety culture built into the industry independent of government regulation, that wouldn’t change overnight even if the government regulators change. But removing a slice of Swiss cheese is still bad, and cause for concern.
The best time to fly is after incidents.
That used to be good advice. The best time to fly now is before planes started falling out of the sky.
Everyone dies.
Reminds me of that guy who deliberately books vacations to places that have just suffered terrorist attacks. Cheap as fuck and super safe since there are security forces everywhere. Not sure I agree with the practice, but can’t really fault the logic.
Yep, that’s pretty similar. Might be a good travel idea, but one would have to take care regarding any issue that the locals might have with foreigners after tragedies in their communities.
I’m not flying until this gets sorted out. The fact that we elected a fucking Russian saboteur twice is just incomprehensible. NPVIC might save us in the nick of time, but I doubt it.
I just wish traveling were a more pleasant experience in general. I gotta take an extra day off after coming back home because modes of travel in USA are so exhausting.
Yeah, it’s pretty horrible you have to fly first class to lay back any substantial amount. Even business class just gives you more ass room. I also wish they would run the cabins at a bit higher pressure. I can never seem to get used to that 10,000ft standard.
I should probably move to Colorado for a couple months, I hear once you get conditioned to altitude you don’t have problems with it anymore
I can never seem to get used to that 10,000ft standard.
The standard is 8,000 feet, not 10,000. Some planes, like the Boeing 787, are pressurized to 6,000ft instead.
Good to know, whatever it is still with me a headache half the time
They should have the crash chance on the departures/arrivals screen… Ohio… 7:56am on time 67%. On boarding, Sanf Francisco 4:25pm delayed 75%.
If only DEI was abolished, then these planes should never have crashed
/S
Quick everyone, start talking about high speed rail!
Maybe we have the slightest shot of actually building out, y’know, cheap, fast, effective mass transit for once?
Too bad the California high-speed rail project is being threatened by President Musk.
President Musk will never allow it.
Be prepared for cars in tunnels! And poorly functioning cars at snail pace, at that!
Not as long as the cargo railroad companies hold all the power. America needs an alternate timeline with no fascism, sane governance, and making all railroads public.
You wouldn’t build high speed rail on cargo lines, anyway. New rail corridors need to be established. The LA-Vegas line is being built along an existing interstate, which solves a lot of right-of-way and land usage issues. That’s what you want to do.
That works fine in nowheresville like the Nevada desert. Unfortunately, the bulk of America east of the continental divide is too populated to legally pull that off in any reasonable amount of time.
Much of the cargo lines through much of the country are pretty flat and straight. Tracks and such would have to be upgraded, but doable.
Bigger problem though is my previous mention. They own the lines, so passenger rail is a second-class citizen.
Elon is in power and has too much money shame him into building hyperloop finally
He never intended to build the Hyperloop. From the start, it was a lie to shut down a proposed project to build a west coast high speed rail line.
Yeah, and it can be defeated with elementary school level math, so anyone in government who agreed to fund it should be brought back to school (though they are probably just more corrupt than stupid).
Everyone in the industry tries to focus on how fast a hyperloop can go, and tries to keep any criticism focused on the engineering challenges (and to be clear, there are many, many engineering and safety challenges).
It should never be discussed as “LA to the Bay in X minutes”, it needs to be discussed in terms of passengers per hour.
Given that these vehicles travel very fast, passengers will need to remain seated while the vehicle is in motion. Let’s pretend that the occupants of each vehicle are capable of leaving the vehicle with their luggage in under the FAA’s targeted evacuation time of 90 seconds (even though luggage makes it take like 10x that). That’s 40 loads per hour, and let’s be generous and say they fit 40 people, that’s 1600 people per hour.
That puts it on par with a lane of car traffic. Maybe you can squeeze some more people in there, or really crack a whip to get people out quick, but you won’t be able to get to a fraction of the passengers per hour of high speed rail at ~20,000.
When you actually do calculations with all the other factors, you get ~350 passengers per hour.
High speed rail is amazing! Let’s do it
Does this mean airlines are going to drop prices to drive tickets sales? Because I’m due for a vacation…
No, they’re going to demand government handouts, then spend it on stock buybacks and executive bonuses. Then demand more government money.
I am a aircraft mechanic and I can tell you most of us take our jobs very seriously. Those that dont, don’t get put on the bigger jobs. We take our job very seriously. Air travel is safe. I am extremely careful with my job. I always think about safety and how what I’m doing effects folks.
It’s not that you don’t take your job seriously, it’s that the same amount of work still needs to be done with less people and less oversight. People get tired. People make mistakes when they’re tired and overworked.
https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/monthly-dashboard.aspx
Media is once again the enemy. Crashes happen. They are just getting more clicks right now so they are getting reported more.
To be fair though, the article is more about people’s trust in air travel given the news, not saying that it’s actually less safe.
Fair point. Still the medias fault for the decrease of trust imo
The issue with your stats is it includes non commercial flights, but most people will only hear/care about commercial airline crashes, and 2025 has had a rough start - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft_in_the_United_States
Yep! I genuinely believe this is an effort to 1) keep Americans too scared to leave and 2) keep foreigners too scared of coming in
Idk about all that. I feel like the media latches onto things that are getting clicks which makes the public more concerned something is happening more which means more people click on it.
It’s a disgusting feedback loop that ends up just making people feel shitty.
I choose D) all of the above
