By Cristina Damato
On February 17, a Delta Airlines plane crash-landed at the Toronto-Pearson International Airport in Canada. Investigations are ongoing, but experts suggest that the poor weather in Toronto that day contributed to the crash – 20 inches of snowfall had accumulated, and gusts of wind up to 38 mph. Video footage of the crash also suggests that the pilot did not initiate the flare, a technique where the pilot pulls up the nose of the plane before landing to slow down.
Upon making contact with the runway, the rear landing gear buckled and the plane tilted sideways, ripping off the right wing. It continued down the runway in a ball of fire before coming to rest completely upside down. This left the passengers dangling upside down from their seats; miraculously, all 80 passengers and crew survived, though 21 were hospitalized with injuries such as back sprains and head lacerations. All have now been released from the hospital.
Delta is still in the process of returning luggage to the passengers; this will likely take a while because hazardous substances such as jet fuel may have been released onto the bags during the crash. These will have to be cleaned before being returned to their owners. Delta has offered a no-strings-attached $30,000 to each of the passengers on the plane.
This is the sixth major aviation disaster since December – an unprecedented number for what has been demonstrated to be the safest mode of transportation. On Christmas Day, 2024, an Azerbaijan Airlines flight went down in Kazakhstan, killing 38 out of the 67 people aboard. The pilot attempted an emergency landing after being struck by a flock of birds but did not manage to bring the plane down safely. There is speculation about GPS spoofing and drone attacks from the Russia-Ukraine war being involved, but there is no hard evidence for this.
Four days later, all but two of the 181 people aboard a Boeing 737 flight in South Korea were killed when the plane failed to land on its landing gear and skidded into a wall. The pilot reportedly sent a mayday signal before landing, but investigations from both South Korean and U.S. officials have yet to definitively state the reason for the crash.
In Washington D.C. at the end of January, a plane carrying 60 passengers and four crew members collided with a military helicopter, killing everybody aboard both aircraft. Among the victims were members of the U.S. Figure Skating Team, who had been returning from a national championship in Kansas. Trump openly blamed this disaster on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, though he failed to provide any evidence to support this claim. Just two days later, a medical transport plane carrying a young girl who had just received life-saving treatment crashed into a busy Philadelphia neighborhood less than a minute after taking off. This killed the six people aboard the plane as well as one person in a car on the ground, and 19 others were injured.
Finally, a small plane headed to Nome, Alaska disappeared on February 8, killing the nine passengers and the pilot. Commercial flight is essential for Alaska – as a large and spread out state with little infrastructure, the people rely on flying for transportation. Some high schools even fly to sports games. Investigations are still in progress to unearth why this plane lost elevation and speed so quickly.
Despite public unease caused by this series of aviation disasters, the Trump Administration fired around 400 of the Federal Aviation Administration’s support staff shortly after the D.C. crash, further straining an already understaffed department. This comes as part of a budget-slashing campaign that has laid off an unprecedented 2,300 federal workers, most of which were probationary, since the start of the presidential term.
Contrary to public belief, figures show that this year has been safer for aviation than 2024: there have been 99 incidents so far in 2025 compared to 150 in the same period last year. Even in the face of all these disasters, flying remains the safest mode of transportation.
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