In just a month, we’ve seen several deadly plane crashes leading to questions about safety in aviation. Misinformation has quickly spread on social media, including the number of crashes in the president’s first month in office and how it compares to previous presidents. NBC6’s Hatzel Vela reports
A midair collision between a passenger jet and a helicopter over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. A medevac jet that hurtled toward the ground and exploded in Philadelphia. A commercial flight that flipped upside down while landing in Toronto.
In recent weeks, videos of planes crashing and burning have populated social media and news feeds. For many people, the disasters' frequency seemed out of the ordinary. "(Seven) plane crashes since the Trump administration congratulated itself for ‘restoring aviation safety,’" liberal podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen wrote Feb. 16 on Threads.
The post listed specific aviation events from Jan. 29 through Feb. 15, and not all were fatal or passenger flight crashes, a sign of people's increasing awareness of smaller aircraft accidents and other non-crash accidents. Social media users and politicians also called out President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders on federal hiring and aviation safety after these aviation accidents.
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WATCH HERE"A 400% increase in plane crashes is absolutely something to be alarmed about, has nothing to do with ‘DEI’ hires and is absolutely connected to the mass illegal firings happening," a Feb. 17 Threads post said.
But these claims are misleading. Although plane crash news is alarming, data shows that commercial passenger flight accidents are rare, and the overall number of recent aviation accidents is not out of the ordinary. Commercial flying is statistically very safe.
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In the past decade, the National Transportation Safety Board has recorded more than 1,100 aviation accidents and incidents each year. They rarely involve commercial aircraft. That accident/incident figure is small compared with the more than 45,000 flights that the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Organization handles every day.
Jeff Guzzetti, aviation safety consultant and former NTSB air safety investigator, told PolitiFact the public is increasingly aware of plane crashes because of "recent commercial air carrier accidents which have killed or injured paying passengers."
"Commercial aviation accidents like this are extremely rare, so when they happen, they get lots of attention," Guzzetti said.
PolitiFact
NBC 6 has partnered with PolitiFact to closely examine claims made by lawmakers
Has Trump seen more accidents during his first month in office than other presidents?
No, federal data shows Trump’s numbers are not an anomaly compared with other presidents.
The NTSB’s Case Analysis and Reporting Online recorded 48 U.S. aviation accidents from Jan. 20, when Trump was inaugurated, to Feb. 20. That number did not include three accidents that Cohen noted in his post: the Delta crash in Toronto; the Feb. 12 San Diego Bay crash; or the Feb. 16 Georgia crash. It can take around two weeks after an accident for a preliminary report to appear in the database.
Five of the 48 accidents were fatal:
- Sixty-seven people died in the Jan. 29 Washington, D.C., crash.
- On Jan. 25, an airplane crashed near Charlottesville, Virginia, killing the pilot.
- On Jan. 31, a medevac jet crashed in Philadelphia, killing six people onboard and one person on the ground.
- On Feb. 6, a regional airline flight crashed in Nome, Alaska, killing 10 people.
- On Feb. 14, a plane crashed in Pierson, Florida, killing the pilot.
NTSB is still investigating these accidents.
Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., wrote in a Feb. 17 X post, "No president has had more planes crash in their first month in office than Donald Trump."
The NTSB doesn’t classify aviation accidents in terms of "crashes," but its data shows that former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden each had more aviation accidents in their first month in office than Trump did in the first month of his second term.
Cassie Baloue, Swalwell’s spokesperson, told PolitiFact he was referring to "the two major commercial air disasters that occurred in the first month of Trump’s current presidency."
During the first month of Biden’s term, there were 61 aviation accidents and incidents, 12 fatal. Two of them involved commercial air carriers, but neither was fatal, or involved a crash.
In the first month of Obama’s first term in 2009, investigators recorded 88 aviation accidents and incidents — three involving commercial air carriers — with 19 of them resulting in a total of 89 fatalities. One New York crash killed 50 people.
The first month of Trump’s first term in 2017 saw 85 aviation accidents and incidents, with 12 of them resulting in a total of 18 fatalities.
PolitiFact previously spoke with experts who said Trump’s policies were unlikely to have affected the operations surrounding the Washington, D.C., crash. Statements from a union representing air traffic controllers said before the crash that it was unclear whether the hiring freeze affected them.
Less than 24 hours after the Washington, D.C., crash, Trump blamed diversity hiring policies as the cause of the accident, but provided no evidence. Experts warned against pinpointing a sole cause for the crash so soon after it happened.
How frequently do aviation accidents occur?
The NTSB investigates and classifies events involving aircraft and passengers as "accidents" and "incidents," and the data shows both are fairly frequent. Not all involve dramatic scenes of fire or planes falling from the sky, but most prompt investigation.
The Code of Federal Regulations defines an aircraft "accident" as occurring between the time any person boards the aircraft and disembarks, and "in which any person suffers death or serious injury, or in which the aircraft receives substantial damage."
An "incident" is "associated with the operation of an aircraft, which affects or could affect the safety of operations." For example, a civilian drone collided with a Canadian firefighting plane Jan. 9 in Los Angeles, damaging and grounding the plane. No one was injured; the NTSB classified it as an incident.
The Code of Federal Regulations governs operations under air carriers (large commercial aircraft, including cargo and passenger planes), commuter and on-demand carriers (aircraft with fewer than 10 passenger seats) and general aviation (aircraft including turboprops and miscellaneous jets).
In the past decade, more than 1,100 civil aviation accidents — accidents involving nonmilitary flights using U.S.-registered aircraft — have occurred every year, with over 300 fatalities recorded annually. Air carrier accidents, which include commercial passenger flights as well as commercial cargo flights, averaged 27 per year from 2012 to 2022. Of 300 accidents during that period, six were fatal.
In a 2024 report, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics said that between 2013 and 2022, U.S. passenger airlines recorded 12 fatalities.
!function(e,n,i,s){var d="InfogramEmbeds";var o=e.getElementsByTagName(n)[0];if(window[d]&&window[d].initialized)window[d].process&&window[d].process();else if(!e.getElementById(i)){var r=e.createElement(n);r.async=1,r.id=i,r.src=s,o.parentNode.insertBefore(r,o)}}(document,"script","infogram-async","https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js");It is not unprecedented for fatal commercial air carrier accidents to happen within a short timespan, but it is exceedingly rare.
On Dec. 8, 2005, a Southwest Airlines flight rolled through fences onto a roadway and collided with an automobile, killing a child and injuring several other people. A few days later, on Dec. 19, 2005, an airplane operating as a Chalk’s Ocean Airways flight crashed into a shipping channel, killing 20 people.
Before the Jan. 29 Washington, D.C., crash, the last fatal accident involving a large commercial aircraft was in 2022, when a ramp agent was killed after being sucked into an engine. Before that, the last fatal passenger flight accident was in 2019, when a PenAir flight overran a runway in Alaska, killing one person.
From 2012 to 2021, the NTSB issued findings for 11,739 general aviation accidents. In 81% of the cases, investigators identified personnel issues as a factor. That can include how employees and operators performed tasks, their actions and decisions, their psychological state as well as their experience and knowledge. In 80% of the cases, investigators named aircraft issues as a contributing cause and, in 44% of the accidents, environmental issues were cited.
!function(e,n,i,s){var d="InfogramEmbeds";var o=e.getElementsByTagName(n)[0];if(window[d]&&window[d].initialized)window[d].process&&window[d].process();else if(!e.getElementById(i)){var r=e.createElement(n);r.async=1,r.id=i,r.src=s,o.parentNode.insertBefore(r,o)}}(document,"script","infogram-async","https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js");Guzzetti said aviation accidents are not getting deadlier.
"The statistics indicate that the number of fatal general aviation accidents has been relatively flat the past few years, and actually the rate of fatal accidents has been declining a bit," he said.
That’s confirmed by NTSB’s general aviation accident dashboard, which shows accident rates dropping between 2012 and 2021.
PolitiFact Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this story.
