Keisha Katrina has always been a confident flyer, but the spotlight on air travel safety amid recent crashes led a sliver of doubt to seep into her mind as she was about to set out on her recent trip to Chicago.
The 43-year-old said she reconsidered her flight “for about a second” before remembering that flying is still the safest way to travel. She brushed the momentary worry aside and boarded a plane with her daughter and her daughter’s best friend last week for a birthday celebration.
“I just feel like you pray and you pack your bags, you don’t let [doubt] stop you from doing anything that you want to do,” Katrina said after landing at O’Hare from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Thursday.
Katrina is not alone. Though most Americans still believe air transportation is generally safe, a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll shows that confidence slipped slightly following a deadly midair collision over Washington, D.C., last month.
The poll, conducted Feb. 6-10, shortly after the Jan. 29 collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army helicopter, shows that 64% of U.S. adults say plane travel is “very safe” or “somewhat safe.” That’s down slightly from 71% last year. About two in 10 U.S. adults now say air transportation is very unsafe or somewhat unsafe, up from 12% in 2024.
That’s despite studies and figures that show air travel remains safe and is becoming safer. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers released in August 2024 showed the fatality risk from commercial air travel was one per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally from 2018 to 2022, a significant improvement from one per 7.9 million boardings from 2008 to 2017.
In 2024, the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics identified air travel as the safest form of transportation in that year’s Transportation Statistics Report. And 2025 is on pace for fewer fatal aviation accidents compared with the past few years. There have been 14 fatal U.S. aviation accidents so far this year, according to National Transportation Safety Board data. In January and February last year, there were 31 fatal accidents. There were 28 during the same period in 2023.
But Anusha Rajasekar, who lives in the Chicago area and travels frequently for business, says people are being influenced by the images and videos of the recent aviation incidents they see on the news and on social media, which can exacerbate fear.
Footage of the Washington crash made the rounds online shortly after the crash. Weeks later, video of a Delta Air Lines jet flipping on its roof while landing in Toronto was also widely shared.
Rajasekar said she’s also a confident flyer and trusts that airlines are following their safety procedures but after seeing images of recent incidents, she grows more nervous when her plane shakes from turbulence.
“It’s because of the fact that it’s happening back to back,” Rajasekar said at O’Hare. “It’s just gaining the attention, and that’s the reason people are scared.”
Richard Zinbarg, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, said news coverage and online images of aviation disasters give people the feeling that air travel is less safe when the reality is the opposite. He says that is partly due to how the human brain is wired.
Our brains have an “older” structure called the limbic system that is involved in behavioral and emotional responses, especially in matters of survival. We also have a “newer” cerebral cortex, which is responsible for higher brain functions and reasoning.
When we see an “emotional stimulus,” like videos of plane accidents, that information is transmitted directly to our limbic system and also through the cerebral cortex, which takes slightly longer.
“Although we might experience cognition is taking place instantaneously, it does take time for a neural impulse to travel down a neuron, and visual system directly to limbic system is just one synapse, so it’s relatively quick,” Zinbarg said. “Visual system up to cortex, cortex to limbic system is two synapses. A slower route of transmission. So fear is gonna start to get activated before logical knowledge can be brought to bear on it.”
Zinbarg also said the availability heuristic can also explain the dip in confidence. An availability heuristic is a mental shortcut where someone makes a decision or prediction based on readily available examples or recent experiences, even though that information may not tell the whole story.
Other passengers at O’Hare blamed the media for saturation coverage of every aviation incident — big and small — creating more examples of incidents that people can use to justify their fears.
For her part, Katrina urges anxious flyers to try and remember that flying is safe and to not let fear dictate their lives.
“Go ahead and book that flight and have fun, don’t miss that important event,” she said.
Zinbarg noted that there have previously been periods of mistrust in air safety, notably after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, but confidence rebounded.
“Whatever drop in confidence there is is likely to be temporary,” Zinbarg said.
Contributing: Associated Press