If you spent any time scrolling through news feeds last year, you probably felt that familiar pit in your stomach more than once. It seemed like every time you turned around, there was another headline about a "close call" or a tragic accident. People are genuinely asking: how many plane crashes has happened in 2025, and is it actually getting more dangerous to fly?
The short answer is a bit of a paradox. While the total number of accidents involving large passenger jets remained historically low, 2025 was a "noisy" year for aviation. We saw a handful of high-profile tragedies that drove the fatality count higher than the year before. Honestly, it’s one of those years where the statistics say one thing, but the headlines tell a much scarier story.
The Raw Numbers: Breaking Down 2025
When we talk about "plane crashes," the aviation industry usually splits them into categories. You've got the big commercial airliners, regional turboprops, and then "general aviation"—which is basically everything from a hobbyist in a Cessna to private corporate jets.
According to year-end reviews from safety consultancies like To70 and preliminary data from ICAO, there were 5 fatal accidents involving large commercial passenger aircraft globally in 2025.
Now, five might sound like a small number, but it’s the human cost that hit harder this time. These five accidents resulted in 366 deaths among passengers and crew. To put that in perspective, that’s about 100 more lives lost than in 2024. However, because the total number of flights worldwide keeps climbing—hitting record highs in 2025—the actual rate of fatal accidents was roughly one per 7 million flights.
If you’re doing the math, that is still incredibly safe. You’re more likely to get struck by lightning while winning the lottery than to be in a fatal crash on a major airline. But that doesn’t make the 2025 events any less tragic.
The Tragedies That Defined the Year
You can’t just look at a spreadsheet to understand why people are worried. A few specific incidents in 2025 stayed in the public consciousness because of how unusual or devastating they were.
The Air India Flight 171 Disaster
By far the deadliest event of the year happened on June 12, 2025. An Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad. This was a massive shock to the industry because the Dreamliner had a near-spotless safety record until then.
The plane was headed for London Gatwick. Tragically, 241 people on board died, along with 19 people on the ground when the aircraft came down. There was one miracle: a single survivor named Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, who managed to crawl out of a gap in the fuselage. Preliminary reports suggested a "fuel starvation" issue where the engines were accidentally cut off during the most critical phase of flight. It’s the kind of "human error meets technical glitch" scenario that keeps safety experts up at night.
The Potomac River Mid-Air Collision
Earlier in the year, on January 29, 2025, a bizarre and terrifying accident happened right over Washington, D.C. An American Eagle CRJ700 (operated by PSA Airlines) was on its final approach to Reagan National Airport when it collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter.
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All 64 people on the jet and three soldiers in the helicopter perished. Seeing a commercial airliner go down in the Potomac River—a haunting echo of the 1982 Air Florida crash—sent shockwaves through North America. It raised massive questions about how military and civilian air traffic are coordinated in busy urban corridors.
Other Notable Incidents
- South Sudan: A Beechcraft 1900 crashed in January near an oil field, killing 20 people.
- Honduras: A Jetstream 32 plunged into the sea near Roatan in March. Thirteen people died, though five survived the initial impact and were rescued from the water.
- Russia: In July, an Angara Airlines Antonov An-24 crashed 15km short of the runway in Tynda during poor weather. This was a classic "controlled flight into terrain" (CFIT) accident, often caused by outdated navigation tech and pilot fatigue.
Why Does It Feel Like It’s Getting Worse?
If the accident rate is actually dropping (one in 7 million is better than 2024’s one in 5 million), why are we all so anxious?
Basically, it's the "Turbulence Factor."
In 2025, we saw a massive spike in non-fatal but terrifying incidents. Turbulence is getting worse—scientists point to climate change and shifting jet streams as the culprits. There were 58 serious non-fatal accidents in 2025, and nearly half of those were caused by severe turbulence.
You’ve probably seen the videos: food carts hitting the ceiling, laptops flying, and passengers being hospitalized. While these aren't "crashes," they are "accidents" in the eyes of the FAA and NTSB. In 2025, 24 crew members and 13 passengers suffered serious injuries (broken bones, head trauma) just from hitting bumps in the air.
The General Aviation Gap
We’ve focused mostly on the big jets, but if you look at the total "how many plane crashes has happened in 2025" for all aircraft, the numbers are much higher. In the United States alone, the NTSB investigated over 600 aviation occurrences by mid-year.
Most of these involve small private planes, crop dusters, or medical helicopters. For example, a medical Learjet 55 crashed in Philadelphia in February, and a Cessna Citation went down in San Diego in May. These don't always make the national evening news, but they make up the bulk of the "crash" statistics you see cited by insurance companies.
What Most People Get Wrong About Safety
A lot of people think that "old planes" are the problem. That’s not really true. In 2025, we saw issues with brand-new tech (like the Dreamliner) and very old tech (the Antonov in Russia).
Safety isn't just about the age of the bolts; it's about the Safety Management System (SMS). The reason flying is still the safest way to travel is that the industry is obsessed with data. Modern planes record thousands of data points every second. Even when a plane doesn't crash, if it has a "near miss" or a weird engine glitch, it gets analyzed to death so it doesn't happen again.
What You Should Actually Do
If you’re planning to fly this year or next, don’t let the 2025 stats scare you off. Instead, use them to be a smarter traveler.
1. Wear your seatbelt. Seriously. It’s not just for takeoff. The biggest risk in 2025 wasn't the plane falling out of the sky; it was the plane dropping 100 feet in clear-air turbulence while you were headed to the bathroom. If you're in your seat, keep the belt buckled.
2. Watch the safety briefing. In the Air India crash, the survivor escaped because he knew exactly where his nearest exit was. In a crisis, your brain freezes. Knowing the "two rows back" rule can literally save your life.
3. Put the phone away during taxi and takeoff. The most dangerous parts of a flight are the first three minutes and the last eight. Being "situational aware" during these times is just common sense.
4. Check the airline, not just the price. While major carriers are extremely safe, 2025 showed that smaller, regional operators in countries with less oversight (like the incidents in South Sudan or Russia) carry a statistically higher risk.
The reality is that how many plane crashes has happened in 2025 is a number that tells a story of extreme rarity. We hear about every single one because they are so unusual. If cars crashed as rarely as planes, the news would never have time to cover anything else.
For those interested in the deep-dive data, the full ICAO and IATA safety reports for 2025 are typically finalized by mid-2026, providing the definitive final tally of every minor incident and mechanical failure recorded worldwide. Until then, the focus remains on fixing the human errors and coordination gaps that defined the most tragic moments of last year.