What's going on with the airline industry? Like 4 or 5 aircraft crashes in the last few weeks. My wife is convinced some foreign entity is messing with our planes.

DEI plays a big part.

The recent accidents have multiple casualties and are more publicized.

NTSB list fatal accidents in US as of 02/06/2025

https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/ResultsV2.aspx?queryId=70b2035a-498e-4a6f-8c25-c4b83ab27367

Pretty sure if that was going on they would be dropping like flies. As much as people hate to admit it, randomness just happens. Sometimes I would make it an entire week with no shootings and there would be 20 the next week. Same weather, pretty much the same moon, no new beefs and all would be unrelated. When the brass would ask WTH happened I would just say the city.

Democrats think it's all Trump's fault.

I think this is the correct answer. Sometimes, stuff happens and sometimes a bunch of stuff happens to snowball.

There are a lot of plane crashes, thankfully most aren’t catastrophic and involve commercial airliners. The recent highly publicized crashes (the Reagan airport and the medjet out of Philly) both seem like anomalies. The DC one is unique because of the craziness of the airspace around Reagan and the military helicopter seemingly being the issue. The Philly one also is different to me than what potentially happened yesterday. Private jet, filled with medical supplies, the way it just dive-bombed out of the sky…

I haven’t seen the latest on yesterday’s crash, but it seems like a miraculous job by the pilots to land upside down and have no deaths (last I saw).

We're very aware that is not the problem. I have been leaning towards just randomness, but they keep popping up again.

I saw a pilot land a small plane with a dead engine on a golf course fairway. A guy on a golf cart never saw or heard the plane and drove out in front of it. When I got there and saw the plane and golf cart all mangled up together the pilot was so mad because he had stuck the landing perfectly, until the golf cart messed I it up. Stuff just happens.

Per one of my oldest friends who has been a captain for 30 years, DEI plays a small part as standards have lowered to meet certain goals. That said, the biggest challenge is a shortage of pilots so we have pilots with much less flight time and experience in the cockpit than we did just 10 years ago.

I haven’t seen the latest on yesterday’s crash, but it seems like a miraculous job by the pilots to land upside down and have no deaths (last I saw). [/quote]

I just watched the video, Plane came down right side up , came down hard, landing gear collapsed, then it flipped.

MO

There are still flight standards that have to be met, so DEI is not the main driver right now.

It is the flight time/ experience.

The last few commercial flights have been hand flown the entire time. The FOs need the hand flying experience as most of the training schools are utilizing auto pilot even in primary training.

My son says I cheat too much as I use the autopilot all the time.

Pardon me if I am wrong, but flight hours are flight hours, whether you are "hands on the controls" or autopiot, you are still the pilot in command and the hours count.

The only difference I could see from what you are saying is landing, and doing a manual approach vs an autopilot gps guided approach.


The recent events have little to do with anything more than a plane crash that caught the nations attention and then every aviation story after was highlighted. In effect, there have been two commercial airline accidents in the last month. This is not uncommon in some areas of the world and probably nothing more than a few tragic events close together in an area (north america) that does not experience airline accidents often at all (unless you want to include all the small commuter type airlines that fly around alaska and canada). The other stuff has been incidents that happen somewhat regularly and just never make the news, unless the news wants it to be made.

Just a run of bad luck! Peaks and valleys in all things

Yep. I’m no expert, but I don’t see anything in common with these.

Except the news reporting about every incident until they find something else to report on.

The pilots were pretty much along for the ride after that landing gear collapsed and the wing hit the ground. Physics took over and thankfully the wings sheared off leaving much of the fuel behind.

Flight hours are flight hours, but hand flying makes you a better pilot. You have to stay on heading, maintain altitude, and manage power while moving through changes in wind, storms, and passengers doing stupid stuff.

While hand flying, during the arrival portion and landing portion, you have to manually crab and manage power to stay on the glide path. You then have align the airplane to the runway and flare to land. It is more work and makes you a better pilot.

All of this used to be done when flying at the regional airlines for 3-5 years, moving from FO to Captain. The pilots learned the basics of being in the airlines and managing the support items/services with a more senior pilot. With a pilot shortage, pilots are getting promoted faster than they did before.

Think your training during residency, 4 years? How many cases did you do? Did the surgeon who did the minimum amount of cases come out as well trained as the one who did twice as many cases? Same 4 years. An ATP (airline transport pilot) has to have 1500 hours, but they never the exact same experience.



Automation has made pilots less pilots and more GPS managers.

What happens when the hardware completely fails? You hand fly the airplane.

What happens when the hardware is not doing it correctly (input error or equipment failure)? You hand fly the airplane.

You are correct about small airplanes having more incidences. It is not sexy, so the news outlets do not cover it.

Plane crashes are trending right now. In a few weeks they’ll find something else and it will appear to be an epidemic.

And another Navy ship in a collision.