What is the deal with all these accidents?

First, let’s put the facts.

Four accidents have occurred in the past ten weeks: Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 On Christmas Day Jeju Air Flight 7c2216 On December 29; US Airways flight 5342 On January 29; and Delta 4819 contact trip On February 17.

There were many private news accidents in the news recently, too, from Ambulance flying crashes In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, before Super Bowl directly to air collision in Scottsdale, Arizona, only last week. In fact, data from the National Transport Safety Council (NTSB) show that there was there 13 is a deadly plane crash In the United States alone since the beginning of the year, including private and commercial flights.

This is only what happens in the sky. On the ground, things appear like chaos.

The Federal Aviation Administration has announced that it was about 400 employees starting On Valentine’s DayJust two weeks after the air collision over Ronald Reagan National Airport. In a combat post on XTransport Minister Sean Duffy said that all the workers who were placed “under observation” insisted that any of the air traffic monitors or “decisive safety employees”.

“The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) runs the safest and most complex aviation system,” said the agency spokesman. “We are constantly proactive, consistent and paved in implementing our responsibilities for the American public.”

A spokesman for the professional aviation safety specialists (PASS), a union that represents more than 11,000 federal aviation workers, said that the ends affected 132 of its members, including mechanics, aviation operations specialists, and aviation safety assistants.

Dave Speero, the National Traffic Chairman, from Dove’s description of the affected employees. They were accountable for safety personnel in the front line. This destroys the ecosystem for aviation. “

certainly Feel Like the global aviation system, it disintegrates in layers. Every video I watch from the last incidents makes my mind wear primitive fear. It is not normal to see a regional plane 20 tons upside down on an active runway, like the child’s game that has been bored. It is not normal to watch the medevac decrease to the ground. It is not normal to obtain a text from a person you know who says that the plane crash in the national Reagan was very close so that the effect of the backyard could be heard. Certainly I will understand whether you have decided that the next time you need to take a trip around the country, you can withdraw the AMTrak website first.

Before you do it, let me tell you two things that seem to be contradictory to air travel. I cannot promise that they will make you feel better, but I think they will help you understand a confusing period in the history of modern aviation.

First, there is a simple statistics issue. Yes, four commercial aircraft have crashed in the past two months, and three of these incidents were fatal. Experimental, this is more disrupted than it was in any other two -month period since 2019. But according to Oag, the leading global aviation provider is estimated. 6.2 million total flights It happened during the same time period. In other words, even during this period of high relative risks, your chances of getting a killer crash were about 1 out of every two million.

(General Aviation, which includes private flights and companies, less safe; the accident rate is present 25 times higher than commercial due to the least stronger training and maintenance requirements compared to commercial airlines for private pilots))

But although we are talking about risks in terms of average and possibilities, the reality does not tend to be very smooth.

“For any long -term danger, half of the time will be the highest observation rate,” says David Spigehlter, a professor of honorary statistics at Cambridge University. “We should not expect events to be evenly apart. There will be clear groups.”

For a longer period of time, this height in accidents does not look very disturbing. Between January 2021 and November 2024, three incidents of a killer plane occurred only around the world. The average risk of a deadly accident was for every 18 million trips. In 2021, however, there have been seven fatal accidents around the world, raising the risk file to 1 out of 3.5 million trips, which is closer to risk during the past two months:

But there is still a decrease of 97 percent since the 1960s:

In other words, we are arguing about a risk that is still 60 years old even after recent accidents, and this is still young over the course of human life. If all we had to do was to persuade our rational mind that flying was safe, then these statistics would do so.

Of course, this is not the challenge.

“Any time the public sees these incidents, they are concerned,” said Hassan Shaheed, President and CEO of the Aviation Safety Foundation, a non -profit institution that focuses on aviation safety and calling research. “Is it safe to fly, can I take my family on a trip? It is understandable.”

Shahid notes that the only way to reduce the risks to zero is to put every plane in the world. So instead, nervous fennels encourage the indication that the risk is low, and that thousands of flights occur every day without an accident, and all these incidents are not related. “What happened in Washington with a collision has nothing to do with what happened in Toronto.”

Despite all the progress we made, the aviation safety system remains fragile. It was also written in 2021Covid-19 pandemic pushed early retirement for experienced pilots, mechanics and airline attendance. The airlines have Struggle for backfilling These roles have returned with the return of passengers, which led Aviation delays and service disturbances Throughout the country. And in a field where the experiment is related directly with safety – a pilot with More than 5,000 hours of the flight time is 57 percent lower to participate in a crashFor example – the loss of many old warriors adds some risks to the system.

The country’s air traffic control system is also under pressure. Ninety percent of the country’s air traffic control centers Chronic deficiency employeesWith employees to work regularly for 10 hours six days a week. Meanwhile, more than a third of the information technology systems in these centers are in a “non -sustainable” state, according to September 2024 Report.

Compared to countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom, which has succeeded in updating its ATC systems over the past two decades, the United States has left. FAA does not expect to address these update concerns At least 2030Due to the lack of funding from Congress.

Davi is an invitation Elon Musk’s Spacex to help “visualize how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system” and Wireless find out A group of Spacex engineers already operates in FAA. At this stage, the update may require a kind of assistance in the private sector, and the public and private partnerships may not necessarily require anything bad. NAV CANADA CONDUCTS Canadian Airpace, and according to Shahdi, is one of the best modern systems in the world.

The entire industry was infected with this decline between me, at the expense of passenger safety. In 2023, it was claimed that the Indian Nile Airlines ordered the instructions of its pilots using an insecure drop to save money on fuel, which led Four tail accidents. In Europe, the distributor of fake parts sold thousands of Lower motor components To the airlines is more interested in a good deal than doing their diligence. The most terrible of everything is Boeing, which has installed a piece of cheap and weak written software at a maximum of 737 to save design costs; This program caused two incidents in 2018 and 2019, and me Reinforcing votes in my next book.

So don’t worry much about your next trip, because the sky is safe as it can be now. But safety depends on teamwork by airlines, manufacturers, organizers and legislators alike. Each of them is equally important in the series, and if any of them fails, the entire system will also fail. Currently, you do not worry that another plane will fall randomly from the sky tomorrow.

But within a few years, a handful of aircraft is likely to start collapsing for same The reason, because someone decided that following their individual goals was more important than supporting his responsibility towards anyone else.