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Comment by echoangle | Hacker News Reader

Is there something especially significant about this crash? Or is this only because there was a large crash recently?

Twenty-odd years ago there was a rash of US politicians killed in aircraft accidents. This seems like a good source — look at the cluster in late 90s, early 00s - https://politicalgraveyard.com/death/aircraft.html

Very few since then, so it’s much more of an outlier now.

Edit: Incorrect.

Original comment: Any plane crash in the US is unusual and significant.

No it's not, small planes crash frequently.

How frequently?

Somebody could probably answer that using data from FAA, NTSB, NHTSA or whatever, but it's probably all offline right now. :-(

EDIT:

FWIW, the NTSB incident search site still seems to be up.

https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/AviationQueryv2.aspx

According to NTSB 210 in 2021. So a few times a week.

https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/GeneralAviationDashbo...

https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/monthly-dashboard.asp... has a dashboard with the NTSB's aviation data. It lists 8 fatal accidents so far this year.

Multiple accidents per day. A fatal one every ~2 days

https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institut...

Several per day, not all of them fatal https://asn.flightsafety.org/asndb/year/2025/1/N

I'd argue that the fact that it isn't frequent makes it insignificant. 40k people die every year on the roads and, to our detriment, we don't treat that as significant. I wish we would focus on things actually impacting people and not scare people with things that will never happen to them.

Anybody got statistics on air crashes in the US so we can see if the anomaly is only in the attention the crashes receive and not the frequency at which they are happening?

Small planes crash all the time:

https://asn.flightsafety.org/asndb/year/2025/1

Even if you only consider fatal crashes in the US, the last one before the DC incident was just this past Saturday.

https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/473308

I know small planes crash a lot, but I feel like small jets crashing is a bit more notable? Maybe just because there arent that many comparatively.

I think the most recent small jet crash in the US was November 5:

https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/458776

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