Washington
CNN
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A commercial plane and an Army helicopter collided, causing area jets to roll on land, and five families were killed after the helicopter plunged into the Hudson River.
The crash was one of over 100 incidents this year, including everything from commercial passenger aircraft to smaller, so-called common aviation aircraft, often fed by civilian pilots. And it's only April. The airline reported a decline in ticket sales following a series of famous incidents as customers reported fears of flight.
That raises doubts: Was this one of the most dangerous years to fly?
A report analyzed by CNN for the National Transportation Safety Board shows a decline in the number of accident investigations in the first quarter of 2025. The NTSB led 171 civil aviation surveys from January to March 2025.
There were 185 surveys in the same time frame last year. The first three months of 2010-2019 were surveyed on an average of 215.
Mary Schiavo of CNN Transportation Analyst attributes public perceptions of aviation safety to the moment they get caught up in a video that “latches everyone away.” She points to an airborne collision in January between a US Army helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
“Rog arrogance of flying through commercial spaces without proper equipment on or functioning,” Schiavo said. “I mean, it's incredibly rog arrog. There's no room for rog arrog in aviation.”
The helicopter flew without a tracking system called the ADS-B.
“I think this year, outside of the DCA, everything that's revealed, is even worse than the DCA. Without the NTSB, I would have known about the 15,000 near misses,” she said. “It's shocking – we wouldn't have known about it.”
Proof of data
As an inspector for the US Department of Transport from 1990 to 1996, Schiavo worked closely with both sides of the aisle and the FAA. At the time, she explained that accidents, incidents and pilot deviation rates were publicly available and even further categorized by the criteria of each type of operator.
“Now, the (FAA) has stopped them publicly, at least publicly, saying, “Look, when one accident happens, when one fatal accident happens, it's really distorting the data,” she said.
CNN reached out to the FAA for comment, but the agency pointed out the database online.
Many civil servants have spoken out about how aviation remains the safest form of travel despite a recent string of events.
Until the fatal incident in January, there were no major commercial air crashes in the country as a flight run by Colgan Air crashed into a home in 2009 with an approach to Buffalo, New York.
In 2013, an Asiana Airlines flight crashed at San Francisco International Airport, killing three people, but 287 people fled alive. There have been other flights around the world that killed Americans, but since then, no major fatal incidents have occurred in the US.
But Schiavo says there's more to be done.
“They didn't define the level of safety as being safe,” she said.
The FAA needs to develop “objective standards” for a safe meaning, she said, and the agency needs quantifiable safety measures to understand how it defines safety.
Statistically speaking, passenger car accidents remain the most deadly mode of transport. In 2023, around 40,000 people killed car crashes in the United States, according to the latest figures from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
It is important to distinguish
Despite many incidents that have occurred this year, Hassan Shahidi, president and CEO of Flight Safety Foundation, said it is important for passengers to distinguish small aviation accidents from major commercial aviation accidents.
In addition to the January collision at Reagan National Airport, there was also a Delta regional jet that slumped while landing in Toronto. All passengers and crew survived. However, it was an important event currently being investigated by the Canada Transportation Safety Board.
These were different accidents from the tourist helicopters that crashed into the Hudson River and killed five families, crashing into a Philadelphia neighborhood, killing a small Arizona plane crash where one or two people on the ground died.
“These are different categories and a variety of issues,” Shahidi said. “From our perspective, we can't put them all in the same bucket. Helicopter operations are unique and different equipment, etc., so we need to consider them differently than passenger accidents.”
While NTSB's investigation into all crashes this year remains ongoing, the FAA has stopped most helicopter flights near Washington Reagan National, and the tour company's business was soon shut down after last week's crash in Hudson.
However, Shahidi said all commercial aviation accidents were unique. Despite the fatal incident, the year has been relatively similar to the past few years.
“There's something like (helicopter accident) happening, you have family, you have a victim, it really resonates with everyone. How can this happen? That's a very unfortunate,” he said.
