D.C. flight is the latest fatal plane crash: Is flying still the safest form of transport?

30.01.2025 - 14:17 / euronews.com / Joanna Bailey

An American Airlines plane with 64 passengers and crew collided mid-air with a military helicopter yesterday (29 January) as it approached Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, just five kilometres south of the White House and the US Capitol.

Plummeting into the Potomac River, reports are emerging that there are multiple fatalities, although numbers are still unconfirmed.

This is one of several airline crashes in recent months, but according to experts, flying is still the safest form of transport.

Traffic controllers had requested American Airlines Flight 5342 to land on a shorter runway just minutes before the aircraft was due to land, to which the pilots agreed, adjusting their approach.

Minutes later, the plane collided with a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, which was carrying a crew of three soldiers, an Army official confirmed.

Authorities are now conducting a massive search-and-rescue operation. Inflatable boats launched into the river while first responders erected light towers from the shore to illuminate the area.

No official death count has been announced, yet US senator Roger Marshall of Kansas has hinted that it will be high. “When one person dies it’s a tragedy, but when many, many, many people die it’s an unbearable sorrow,” he said.

Investigators are already trying to piece together the aircraft’s final moments by speaking with air traffic controllers and assessing why the passenger jet lost altitude prior to crashing.

In 1982, an Air Florida flight similarly crashed into the Potomac River, killing 78 people, which was attributed to bad weather.

The last fatal crash of a passenger plane in the United States took place in 2008, when 49 passengers are crew were killed near Buffalo, New York, when a Bombardier DHC-8 propeller plane crashed into a house.

The deadliest plane crash in US history continues to be on September 11, 2001, when four jetliners were hijacked by al-Qaida, sending two planes into the World Trade Center in New York, one into the Pentagon in Virginia, and a fourth into a field in western Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people were killed and this incident remains the deadliest terror attack in history.

This latest plane crash in Washington has fanned the flames of recent concerns over flying: at the end of 2024, more than 200 people lost their lives in two separate incidents just days apart.

Thirty-eight people died in December when an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Kazakhstan; four days later, 179 perished when a Jeju Air flight crash landed in South Korea.

While recent events are still ringing in the minds of many, there were other disasters in aviation in 2024. In early January, a fiery crash in Tokyo shocked the world, leaving five members of the Japan Coast Guard