Are there really more plane crashes? - critical summary review

This Sunday morning, two helicopters collided in midair over the west side of Rio de Janeiro and fell onto a car lot in a residential neighborhood. Six people died. One of them was the American singer Oliver Tree, 32, who had performed in São Paulo just days earlier. The aircraft were flying under visual rules, with the pilots relying on their own eyes to stay clear of each other, and Brazilian investigators have only begun their work. For now, what is known is enough for one uncomfortable certainty: these were preventable deaths, in a place where no one was expecting them.

And then comes the thought that may have crossed your mind today, or last week, or last month. This seems to be happening all the time. The list, once you start pulling on it, does not stop.

At the end of April, a small twin-engine plane went down late at night near Wimberley, Texas, about 40 miles southwest of Austin, with no survivors. Back in January, a chartered business jet crashed while trying to land in India, killing 5, among them a regional official in the middle of an election campaign. In March, a military Hercules cargo plane operated by Colombia's air force went down shortly after takeoff and killed 70, the deadliest crash of the year so far anywhere in the region.

And for anyone who still has them fresh in mind, there are the cases that stopped the news cycle last year. The midair collision over the Potomac in Washington, when an American Eagle regional jet and an Army Black Hawk came down together, killing 67. The crash of Air India Flight 171 in Ahmedabad, which took more than 240 lives. Each one arrived through your phone with video, a headline, and the name of a victim you recognized. And it stayed, the way those images stay.

Add it all up and the feeling is that the sky turned dangerous overnight. It is an honest feeling. It just is not, exactly, what the data shows. And understanding why the feeling hits so hard is probably the most useful part of all of this.

what your brain does with it

Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 and spent decades at Princeton studying how we decide, described a mental shortcut that explains what is happening here. He called it the availability heuristic. The idea is simple and a little stubborn: we judge how often something happens by how easily examples of it come to mind. The more vivid, recent, and frightening the example, the more frequent it seems, even when it is not.

A plane crash ticks every box. It has the strong image, the victim with a name and a face, wall-to-wall coverage on every channel at once, the grim detail you cannot unsee. In Kahneman's vocabulary, that is System 1 at work: the fast, intuitive, emotional part of the mind that answers before any math gets done. System 2, the slow one, the part that weighs proportion and probability, almost never gets called in for a headline. Nobody reads about a tragedy and immediately thinks about the denominator.

The result is that the brain keeps the cases beautifully and loses the scale completely. It remembers the six in Rio with movie-quality sharpness and has nowhere to file the millions of flights that, in the same stretch of time, landed with no story to tell. A flight that goes fine is not news, and that is exactly why it disappears from the count.

what the numbers actually say

This is where things start to settle. IATA, the trade body that represents the world's airlines, released its 2025 safety report in March. Over the year there were nearly 39 million commercial flights. Of those, 51 had an accident of any kind, and only 8 were fatal. The overall rate worked out to about one accident for every 760,000 flights.

That number is worth sitting with for a second, because it is counterintuitive on purpose. If you took one flight a day, it would take you more than 2,000 years, on the statistical average, to be on a flight that had any accident at all, most of which involve no injuries. The five-year rolling average points to one fatal accident for every 5.6 million flights. A decade ago, that same figure was one in every 3.5 million. The line, in other words, has been improving, not getting worse. In 2025, for only the second time on record, there was not a single loss-of-control-in-flight accident, historically one of the leading killers.

There is one detail in that report that ties the whole thing together. The two largest disasters of the year, Air India and Washington, accounted on their own for more than three quarters of all onboard deaths in the entire world in 2025. They loom so large in our memory not despite being rare, but because they are rare. If they were common, they would not dominate the count.

not every flight is the same flight

There is one distinction that changes everything, and it almost never makes the headline. Flying is not a single category. On one side there is scheduled commercial aviation, the flight you book in an app: audited, flown by two pilots, with redundant systems, a control tower, a flight plan. That is the part that keeps getting safer year after year. On the other side there is general aviation along with military and charter flights: the private helicopter, the air taxi, the single-engine club plane, the executive jet, the armed forces cargo hauler.

When you read that list from the top again, the pattern shows up on its own. The Hercules was military. The plane in Texas was general aviation. The jet in India was a charter. The helicopters in Rio were flying, by the first accounts, on visual observation alone. These are operations that live on a different tier of risk, with different rules, and they account for the vast majority of the deaths we see. Pouring all of it into one bucket labeled planes is what makes the whole sky look dangerous, when the danger is concentrated in very specific corners of it.

Hans Rosling, the Swedish physician and professor of international health who spent his life teaching people to read the world through data, had a name for what we feel in front of a headline like this. He talked about the drama instinct, the tendency to notice what frightens us and lose all sense of proportion along the way. In the book he wrote at the end of his life, he summed up the way out in a line that reads almost like therapy: the world is not as dramatic as it seems, and looking at the numbers is usually a way of getting your calm back.

This is not about pretending no one died today. Six families woke up to a Sunday that will not be the same, and no statistic comforts that. It is about something else: not letting the shock, however justified, write your reading of reality all by itself. The sky, seen from a distance and with the full count in hand, remains one of the safest places a human being can pass through. The part of you that got scared today is not wrong. It just did not have the calculator in hand.

what to do with this

If you are afraid of flying: know that the fear is aimed at the wrong target. It points at commercial flight, which is exactly the most protected part of aviation. The next time a headline tightens your chest, it helps to ask which kind of flight it actually was before drawing any conclusion about your own.

If you regularly use small planes, air taxis, or helicopters: here the attention makes sense. The FAA and aviation regulators recommend checking the operator and the aircraft before you board in general aviation. It is not paranoia, it is the category where the numbers ask for more care.

If you just want to stop flinching at the next headline: the shortcut is to keep one question ready for when the shock arrives. Is this actually common, or is it just easy to remember? Almost every time, the honest answer disarms half the fear.