Just days before Christmas last year, retired NASCAR driver Greg Biffle died in a tragic plane crash, along with his wife, children, and three others. On Saturday, People reports Colombian singer Yeison Jiménez was one of six people killed in another small plane crash. The crashes weren’t related, but seeing multiple high-profile plane crashes in less than a month does tend to catch people’s attention. Is flying getting more dangerous? Is the Federal Aviation Administration failing at its job? Maybe, but it’s also true that small planes crash far more often than a lot of people realize.
For now, it doesn’t appear the FAA has released its final crash figures for 2025, but despite several high-profile plane crashes last year, last year likely wasn’t especially notable in terms of the total number of plane crashes, even if crash-related deaths might be higher. The crashes themselves were still horrific, and it doesn’t change the pain felt by friends, family, and the greater community, but on average, the U.S. sees more than three plane crashes every single day. Notable crashes certainly grab national headlines, but the vast majority are really only covered locally.
In fact, if the second half of the year ends up looking like the first half, air travel in 2025 might have actually been safer than 2024. As the industry publication Airport Technology reported back in November, from January to July of 2025, the U.S. saw 623 plane crashes or about 3.4 per day. Meanwhile, in the first six months of 2024, we saw 729 plane crashes, or about 4.0 per day. Overall, it’s good when fewer planes crash, and the U.S. is a big country, but still. That’s a lot of plane crashes.
Commercial > private
While you may be shocked to learn how many planes crash every day, the good news is that the planes most people are likely to fly on are still about as safe as travel gets. Nothing in life is every 100% completely safe, but those crash figures are overwhelmingly driven by small planes, not commercial jets. You’ll want to wear your seatbelt, since human-caused climate change is making turbulence worse, but outside of some freak incident that no one could possibly predict, there’s no reason to worry about flying Delta, American, United, Southwest, or any other major commercial airline.
Small planes, however, are a bit of a riskier proposition. That doesn’t necessarily mean you should avoid them completely, but they are still more likely to crash than commercial jets, and you should at least know the risks going in. When it comes to small planes, fly at your own risk. That said, flying has also gotten less dangerous over the years, with Airport Technology citing a crash rate in 2021 and 2022 of 4.8 per 100,000 flight hours. That’s lower than the rate we saw in the preceding decade, which should be expected, given that the crash rate has been dropping for the last 30 years.
Still, if you’ve been wondering why the aviation industry hasn’t been in full-on freak-out mode over recent high-profile crashes, hopefully, you now have a better understanding of why that is. As heartbreaking as it is to see every time it happens, it’s pretty common for multiple small planes to crash every single day. Of course, driving comes with its own dangers, and the U.S. is still the only developed country in the world where the roads continue to get more dangerous, but that’s probably a different conversation for a different day.
