Flying has never been safer. Then why do crashes still haunt us?
By Kaif Shaikh
When Air India Flight 171 went down, it shocked the public and professionals who knew how capable modern jets have become. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, one of the most advanced airliners ever built, had never suffered a fatal crash until this disaster. What made it even more harrowing was the timeline.
From liftoff, the pilots had around forty seconds to recognize a dual-engine problem, diagnose it, and try to save the airplane. That is less time than most people spend reading this introduction paragraph. Yet even as headlines remind us that airliners can still crash, commercial flying has never been safer. More than four and a half billion passengers flew safely in 2024, and the lifetime odds of dying in an air accident have plummeted from about 1 in a million in 1990 to roughly 1 in 15 million by 2025.
The paradox is real: rare events dominate attention precisely because they are uncommon. This article distills how aviation got this safe, why accidents still happen, and what we keep learning after each one, drawing on insights from airline pilot and YouTuber Captain Steeeve and former accident investigator and pilot-turned-professor Shawn Pruchnicki.
Safety was built on yesterday’s worst days
Aviation’s risk curve bent downward because every serious mishap left a durable lesson. Early crashes in the 1930s exposed the limits of wooden structures and pushed manufacturers toward all-metal airframes.
The first generation of pressurized jetliners brought new failure modes: mysterious Comet breakups in the 1950s taught investigators about cyclic pressurization loads and metal fatigue, and how something as simple as square window corners can seed catastrophic cracks. Rounded windows, fatigue testing, and fail-safe structures became standard.
The sky itself forced modernization on the ground. After a devastating midair collision above the Grand Canyon in 1956 that killed everyone aboard two airliners, the United States poured a quarter-billion dollars, an enormous sum for the time, into upgrading air traffic control. That effort ultimately led to the creation of the Federal Aviation Administration to centrally steward aviation safety.
Tragedy that redesigned teamwork
The deadliest accident in aviation history wasn’t a broken part but broken communication. Two heavily loaded Boeing 747s collided on a foggy runway at Tenerife. Out of that disaster came Crew Resource Management (CRM), which redefined cockpit teamwork: explicit callouts, challenge-and-response procedures, and a culture that empowers any crewmember to question and clarify. CRM is why modern crews are trained to collaborate under pressure instead of relying on hierarchy in the worst moments.
Weather you can’t see, and how we learned to see it
Invisible weather once lurked at the edge of pilots’ understanding. An L-1011 approaching Dallas–Fort Worth in a thunderstorm was struck by a microburst, an intense downward blast of air that can erase airspeed and lift in seconds. The jet crashed a mile short of the runway, killing most on board.
That accident triggered seven years of NASA–FAA research and the adoption of forward-looking wind-shear detection radars as standard equipment on airliners in the mid-1990s. Since then, only one other wind-shear-related accident has occurred, a remarkable return on scientific investigation translated into cockpit tools.
Fuel, wiring, and the hazards of “empty”
In 1996, when a TWA 747 departing New York exploded in flight, suspicion initially focused on terrorism. The investigation traced the cause to an explosion in the near-empty center fuel tank, likely triggered by faulty wiring that ignited fuel vapors. The fix wasn’t just one part; it was a philosophy: improve wiring insulation and, in many designs, actively inert unused tanks with gas to remove the flammable mixture. Where risk once hid in emptiness, engineering removed the fuel for disaster.
From engines to algorithms: the new failure modes
Mechanical failures, especially engines, dominated the 1940s through the 1960s. Today’s accidents more often originate at the interface of humans and automation. Modern jets are part airframe, part data center, part software lab. An Airbus A350 carries on the order of tens of millions of lines of code. Sensors, actuators, and flight computers must converse flawlessly. When they don’t, confusion can spiral.
The 737 MAX tragedies illustrated how a single faulty input, in this case, a failed angle-of-attack sensor, can mislead an automated system into repeatedly trimming the nose down. Crews fought back but lacked the training and documentation to diagnose the automation’s behavior rapidly. The result? Software redesigns and new training to align pilots’ mental models with what the system can and will do.
Other incidents have exposed different edges. An Airbus off Australia suffered violent pitch oscillations traced to a software anomaly, showing that code can degrade or behave unexpectedly in service, even when it was sound at certification.
The essential lesson is not that software is unsafe, but that the human–automation handshake is now a primary safety frontier. Pilots must quickly understand what the airplane is doing and why, especially when it isn’t obvious.
Maintenance: the human hands every part passes through
There’s always a human element in aviation, but it isn’t always pilot error. A maintenance flashlight, once found melted inside an engine after an overheat, wasn’t the cause of that particular fault. Still, it illustrates how easily small human slips can infiltrate complex machines. At the other extreme, an incorrect structural repair after a tail strike led a China Airlines 747 to break apart in flight years later, killing everyone on board.
None of this implies that negligence is rampant. If anything, it underscores how far the craft of maintenance has evolved. Modern engines and systems are incredibly precise, tolerances are unforgiving, and repair manuals run to thousands of pages. Airlines and third-party maintenance providers know the stakes. But complexity itself is a risk factor. A misread schematic or skipped lubrication step can become the first link in a chain that only becomes visible after it fails.
Takeoffs and landings are typically flown by hand, but the middle of most airline flights is highly automated. Does that erode stick-and-rudder skills? Training regimes try to prevent it. Crews spend hundreds of hours in simulators replicating engine failures, stalls, and weather nasties down to turbulence models and real airports.
In many sessions, instructors force pilots to click off the autopilot and hand-fly to keep raw flying skills fresh, even if passengers would never notice the difference in the real world. The reality is that decisions don’t wait for perfect information.
It can take 10,000 hours to master the craft, but only ten seconds to face a life-or-death choice. In the loss of Air France 447, a speed sensor iced over at cruise altitude. The autopilot disconnected, the readings didn’t make sense, and a pilot pulled the nose up in the confusion, stalling the airplane from 38,000 feet. Everyone aboard died.
In Amsterdam, a Turkish Airlines crew didn’t realize the autothrottles depended on a radar altimeter that had failed and indicated “on the ground.” The system obediently pulled the thrust back on short final. When the crew noticed the decaying speed and shoved the levers forward, the engines needed seconds to spool. Seconds the jet no longer had.
These aren’t stories about incompetence. They’re about human cognition under ambiguity and training that now emphasizes recognizing and resolving automation surprises.
Air traffic control: invisible workload, visible consequences
Our experts tell us that as more people fly, the airspace around busy airports gets crowded, and radio-based communication leaves room for error. Controllers in the United States are short-staffed, working long weeks and forced overtime. Conditions that increase the risk of runway incursions and miscommunications. A midair collision over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., in January 2025 laid bare how tight margins and human fatigue can intersect.
But even ATC tragedies produce safety dividends. After an airliner in Colombia struck a mountain while flying a shortcut, the investigation translated into two lines of defense. Human procedures and hard-edged technology.
Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning Systems (EGPWS) now bark “Terrain, pull up!” before rocks become a close-in surprise, and CRM helps cockpits challenge assumptions before they calcify into errors.
The anatomy of a rare disaster
Modern accidents are almost never about one bad part or one bad decision. They’re chains. A sensor fails. A tired crew encounters a storm cell. An automation mode behaves as designed, but not as humans expect. A maintenance fix hides a latent weakness that only matters in a narrow slice of the flight envelope. When those holes in the multiple layers of defense line up, disaster can result.
That’s also why aviation keeps getting safer. Every link in the chain is examined afterward. Wreckage is meticulously reconstructed, data is analyzed, simulations are run, and procedures are rewritten. Training changes.
Hardware changes. Software changes. And the knowledge flows across borders and manufacturers. Even with more than a hundred thousand flights daily, the system learns, relentlessly and collectively.
Back to Air India 171, and the forty-second window
A dual-engine power loss just after takeoff leaves almost no options. At altitude, a jet becomes a decent glider; at a couple of thousand feet, it’s an energy-starved machine in a tight box. Captain Steeeve’s point is that some flights offer crews minutes to diagnose, while others offer seconds. In those seconds, training and decisiveness matter most.
When both engines quit right after liftoff, the job isn’t finding a concrete runway. It’s managing the little energy left to trade between lift and distance, picking the least bad outcome in front of you.
None of these excuses fails elsewhere in the system. Investigators will eventually apportion causes across pilot actions, maintenance, design, or other contributors. As Pruchnicki notes, accidents are multifactorial. Human–automation confusion, maintenance missteps, software anomalies, and air traffic pressures all figure in today’s rare but unforgiving events.
