Recent airplane crashes and near misses have everyone freaked out, just as DOGE is laying off workers at the agency charged with keeping people safe in the air. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin and Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members The Delta Air Lines plane that crashed and landed upside down at Toronto International Airport earlier this month. Photo by Katherine KY Cheng/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What recent airplane incidents have sparked safety concerns?
First, there was the one over DC. Shocking. Tragic. The president blamed DEI. Yikes. But then they kept coming. There was that medevac flight that crashed in the middle of Philadelphia. There was a deadly crash on an ice floe in Alaska. There was the Delta flight that landed upside down at Pearson in Toronto.
And then on Tuesday, while we were in a meeting talking about doing this very show, we heard a Southwest flight almost hit a private jet at Midway in Chicago. That same day, the same thing more or less happened back at DCA, the same airport that where that helicopter crashed into a commercial flight, killing 67 people back in January.
On Today Explained, we're asking the question we've all been asking.
Should I really get on a plane right now? Should we just drive instead?
Is it still safe to fly?
What is going on with the planes? I really like landing right side up. Is that weird?
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Chapter 2: Is it still safe to fly despite recent crashes?
Well, that actually happens every time that there's an incident. And so we'll get to the bottom of this in probably between sort of six months to a year's time. But there's really not a ton of quick fixes. And I think the...
Probably the most tragic thing in the American Airlines accident above Reagan is that all of those problems that we talked about, understaffing at the air traffic control center, last-minute deviations in sort of a flight path at the last minute in one of the most congested airports in the entire country, the fact that there's a military base just a couple miles where helicopters are taking off and landing, all of these things are big systemic problems.
And as anybody who's worked in a big organization knows, there's just a lot of inertia that you have to get over in order to fix these things. So it is going to take a lot of effort.
So does that mean that, you know, there's this sense that after a tragedy like this, the one that happened over DCA, that, oh, maybe it's now safer to fly, though, because everyone's going to be on their best behavior. Everyone's going to be looking out for problems. But you're saying the problems here are going to take a while to fix. Does that mean that...
Things didn't even get that much safer after what happened over DCA and in the intervening month?
There's really only one way to ensure that there are no plane crashes anywhere in the world, and that's just to ground every single airplane. As long as you have people flying airplanes, there will be problems that can put people's lives in danger. You should worry about airplanes when they start to crash for the same reason.
You think about the two, for example, Boeing 737 MAXs that crashed in 2018 and 2019. They crashed for the same reason that Boeing had put in this faulty piece of software that could essentially overpower pilots and rip controls away from them and cause a crash. And then they tried to cover it up right afterwards, and that's the sort of thing that you really need to worry about.
I think the best consolation is that we've gotten to the point where the risk of a fatal plane crash is less than one in two million. So I'm comfortable accepting that. The safest thing for you to do is just sit in your room and not do anything all day. I think all of us want to go places, do things, and sometimes you just have to accept a little bit of risk.
Fortunately, air travel is one of the least risky things that you can do.
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