Takeaways From the Times’s Report on Aviation Safety

Magazine|Takeaways From the Times’s Report on Aviation Safety

When an Army helicopter and a commuter jet collided over the Potomac last year, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft, a historic era of airline safety came to an end. American commercial airlines had gone without a fatal crash for 16 years, the longest disaster-free period ever for U.S. air travel.

In the nearly two years since, the strains on the system, which have been mounting for decades, have become acute. One of the best measures of aviation safety is the rate of “runway incursions,” close calls on the ground where planes come dangerously near each other. After a spike in 2023, those incidents fell sharply in 2024 as the F.A.A. and airlines tightened procedures. Since 2025 they have climbed again, and the most serious kind of incursion, where a collision is only narrowly avoided, is running even higher this year than last.

Air travel has been so safe in large part because of a profound commitment from the people in charge to learn from tragedies — what aviation experts call “lessons written in blood.” But the Trump administration has been slow to learn new lessons, and in some cases it seems to be unlearning the old ones.

“We are seeing the vulnerabilities in real time,” Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the N.T.S.B., told me. “We have a duty to act before another tragedy occurs.”

How alarmed should we be? Over 30 years I’ve logged more than 2,000 hours as pilot-in-command of single-engine aircraft, and written three books on aviation. What I have seen since the Potomac crash is something new and worrying.

In a story for the magazine, I take readers through some of the system’s vulnerabilities:

Lessons from the Potomac crash have gone unlearned.

The morning after the Potomac crash, President Trump blamed the disaster on D.E.I. hiring practices during the Obama and Biden administrations. The National Transportation Safety Board found that the real culprit was overcrowding.