For decades, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has considered itself the safest aviation system in the world. When an American Airlines commercial flight carrying passengers from Wichita, Ks. crashed into a military helicopter on Jan. 29, likely killing everyone on board, it was the first collision in U.S. airspace in over a decade. Mid-air collisions are even rarer—the last one in the U.S. was in 1978.
The incident has renewed focus on the recent history of crashes and near misses in the U.S., which in 2023 saw the highest number of serious runway incidents in almost a decade, sparking concerns about staffing and burnout at aviation agencies. A cause of the Jan. 29 crash has not yet been determined.
A delicate system of checks and balances has prevented the United States from more fatal crashes, experts say. “We have redundant systems in our country—automation systems as well as protocols and training that all work together to give us the transportation system that we have today and the safety record that we’ve had over all these years,” says Hassan Shahidi, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation.
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But in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of “near misses”—defined by the FAA as an incident in which two aircraft come within 500 feet of each other, began to rise. In Austin in 2023, a FedEx cargo plane was 200 feet away from crashing into a Southwest Airlines passenger plane, after both were cleared to use the same runway on a foggy day. In New York, in 2023, an American Airlines plane nearly crashed into a Delta flight when they both crossed paths on the same runway.
An investigation conducted by the New York Times in August 2023 revealed a pattern of near collisions that year between commercial airlines— with close calls happening multiple times a week, and at nearly all major airports in the U.S.
The rise, experts say, was attributable to an increase in demands straining the system in the aftermath of the pandemic. “We’ve had a loss of personnel during the pandemic, pilots, air traffic controllers, technicians across the board,” says Shahidi. “And then since the pandemic was over, we’ve had an increase in traffic. That means more demand for personnel and hiring that has happened over the past few years.”
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Then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told TIME in June 2023 that the FAA was taking action to address the uptick. “[They] had a back to basics emphasis going on,” he said. “A fresh look at technical and regulatory solutions.”
Since then, the number of close calls has been on the decline. A recent report from the FAA says that, in the first three months of 2024, the rate of serious incidents decreased by 59 percent from the same period in 2023.
An FAA webpage, last updated in October 2024, highlights the initiatives the FAA has taken to avoid close calls, including ramping up hiring of air traffic controllers and investing millions of dollars in runway improvements across the country. In remarks about the crash on Jan. 30, Trump claimed without evidence that diversity initiatives in aviation hiring “could” have contributed to the incident. “For some jobs, we need the highest level of genius,” Trump said.
Mid-air collisions are far more rare than the runway collisions that the FAA has been looking to prevent. The D.C. crash was even more surprising, experts say, because it occurred in a highly controlled air space in which hundreds of military and commercial flights take off daily.
The cause of the crash is still unknown, but Chad Kendall, Aviation Professor at Metropolitan State University, says that it will likely lead to reforms—the 1978 mid-air crash led to the creation of the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System, or TCAS, which issues automatic alerts to help pilots avoid crashes.
“Aviation has come a long way in a sense of technology and a sense of pilot training and controller training. That’s not to say it couldn’t get better,” he says. “What comes out from this will be improvements that are needed in the system to ensure that this is not going to happen again.”
