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.
Comments
Edit: Incorrect.
Original comment: Any plane crash in the US is unusual and significant.
No it's not, small planes crash frequently.
How frequently?
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
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.
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...
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.