Flight Risks

Here’s an extraordinary statistic.Between February 2009, when a commuter plane crashed on an icy night outside of Buffalo, N.Y., killing 50 people, and January 2025, when an Army helicopter and a commuter jet collided over the Potomac River, killing 67, the major U.S.

airlines handled around 10 billion journeys.Not one person died in a crash during that time.It was the longest disaster-free period in the history of American air travel.

Nearly 16 years! James Fallows, who looks at what has happened to air safety in the months since the Potomac crash, likens the achievement to the government-led effort to create a polio vaccine in the 1950s.There was, he writes, “a profound commitment from the people in charge to learn from tragedies — what aviation experts call ‘lessons written in blood.’”That commitment is weakening now, Fallows reports: “The Trump administration has displayed an extraordinary unwillingness to learn new lessons, and in some cases it seems to be unlearning the old ones.”Fallows is an accomplished pilot and author of three books on aviation.

Here are some of the things he’s learned about aviation safety since the Potomac collision.Unlearned lessons.The day after the crash, President Trump announced his view of why it happened: D.E.I.-focused hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration during the Obama and Biden administrations.

The actual cause, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency, was overcrowding of the airspace.The board made 33 recommendations for changes to equipment and procedures that would lessen the likelihood of future collisions.

But the F.A.A.has not implemented a third of them, which the N.T.S.B.

calls “unacceptable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for...