Nancy Philpot lost two of her former Westinghouse co-workers in the 1994 USAir Flight 427 crash near Hopewell, Beaver County, which killed all 132 passengers on board. Though she was initially hesitant to board an airplane once again, she eventually got over her fear.
But after the past few weeks, Philpot, 60, of Monroeville said that fear has returned.
When she saw on TV that a passenger jet and military helicopter collided near Washington, D.C.’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, she decided to change her summer vacation plans to driving rather than flying.
The D.C. collision was one of several plane crashes across the country in the past few weeks. On Monday, a passenger jet made a hard landing before it lost a wing, burst into flames and flipped onto its roof at Toronto Pierson International Airport, the fourth major aviation accident in North America in the past three weeks, including the medical plane crash in Philadelphia that killed seven people and injured at least 19 others.
Philpot and others are rethinking vacation plans after the spate of crashes this year. Some feel anxiety at the thought of boarding an airplane, while others acknowledge the overall safety of air travel.
“I’ve never seen this many in a short period of time,” Philpot said.
She believed the Hopewell crash in the ’90s was an “unbelievable tragedy.”
“I had friends (who) died on the flight,” she said, tearing up as she spoke, which made her extra conscious of flight safety precautions. “But even that didn’t deter me. I flew, I felt comfortable.”
Philpot planned to travel by airplane this summer to a national park out west with her husband. Though they hadn’t purchased plane tickets yet, she said they stopped searching online following the D.C. crash and decided on a road trip to Canada instead.
Jordan Popp said he’s always hated flying, and the recent crashes have scared him even more.
“I was so terrified of flying. Leading up to vacation, I was like, ‘I’m going to die,’ ” said Popp, 26, of Bethel Park. “I finally got myself to calm down … and then these have happened in the span of a couple weeks.”
Kristy Kiernan, the associate director of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Boeing Center for Aviation and Aerospace Safety in Florida and Arizona, served as a Coast Guard aviator and aviation safety officer for 12 years. She believes people shouldn’t fear commercial flights despite the accidents.
“Flying is safe, but I understand people’s anxiety in the current situation,” she said. “A lot of people are uncomfortable with the amount of control that you give up getting on an airplane.”
Though Samantha Bayura made 22 work trips last year to states like South Carolina, Massachusetts, Louisiana and Alabama — a total of 44 airplane flights — and will fly around the same amount in 2025, she’s unfazed by the recent accidents.
“It’s been pretty smooth, knock on wood,” she said, as she hasn’t experienced many delays or cancellations aside from Delta Air Lines’ network meltdown amid the worldwide CrowdStrike technology outage last July.
Bayura, 42, of Salem Township works as a business implementation specialist at Pace Analytical, a national company that has over 40 locations. It’s her job to help employees at other locations change systems, complete training and problem solve every other week.
Outside of work trips, Bayura also took three vacations — or six additional flights — in 2024, making her total flight count an even 50.
“I feel it’s concerning, but it’s not to the point where I’m worried about actually flying,” she said. “A lot of stuff is out of my control. If it’s out of my control, I don’t worry about it.”
Bayura attributes her nonchalance to the sheer number of flights taking off and landing every day.
“I’m in a numbers field, so I look at the percentages,” she said.
There have been 99 aviation accidents so far this year as of Friday, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Of those, 14 were fatal.
Every day, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Organization (ATO) provides service to more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace. That means that in the first 52 days of 2025, there were over 2.34 million flights that received service from the ATO.
Kiernan explained that the 45,000 number is just a subset of the United States’ total operations — as some flights might not need to communicate with the ATO.
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“It’s not the total number of aircraft operations in the United States; it’s the number that the air traffic control interacts with,” she said.
Widespread impact
Popp’s sister lives in Florida, and he typically flies down to visit her a lot, but he said he’s going to pay attention more when booking flights.
“I think I’d be wary to fly Delta for awhile,” he said, citing the plane that crash-landed and flipped upside down at Toronto Pearson International Airport, sending 18 passengers to the hospital. “I don’t think it matters, but I think it would be make me feel better from a psychological standpoint.”
Every domestic carrier in the United States must meet “incredibly high standards” for flight certification, according to Kiernan.
During pilot training, Kiernan said a common minimum flight hour requirement is 1,500 hours. If someone has received training from the military, it can be half as much.
“It’s a heavy emphasis on repeating tasks so that you can do them automatically, and you are prepared for that feeling when you have a malfunction or when something happens,” she said.
Full motion simulators allow pilots in training to replicate potential in-flight issues or malfunctions that could arise.
“You can feel safe and confident getting on every single airline,” Kiernan said. “A smaller airline … has less opportunity for something to go wrong than an airline that operates 5,000 flights a day.”
Popp said he’s seen videos from the Toronto crash online. It begs the question: are these accidents really worse and increasing, or are people just paying attention more?
“Seeing is believing,” he said. “If you see a plane crash, if you watch a video … it makes it more real,” he said.
Kiernan said she believes videos circulating on social media have heightened fears.
“You can more readily put yourself in that person’s shoes and imagine what that was like,” she said.
However, much can be learned from watching such videos, according to Kiernan. For example, by watching videos of the Toronto crash, she said people now know they should leave all belongings behind in the plane in the event of a crash.
“There can be lessons learned from just about every source … that’s empowering,” she said. “Don’t be frightened by them; try to learn something from them.”
Philpot said it’s worrisome from a federal standpoint to witness numerous high profile crashes.
“It just says to me that there’s some sort of oversight missing that used to be there,” she said.
Hundreds of workers at the Federal Aviation Administration were fired over the weekend as part of a government restructuring under Elon Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump who is heading a cost-cutting initiative, the New York Times reported, following other layoffs at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
“I just don’t have any confidence in the current Department of Transportation,” she said. “I feel that the cuts that are being made to that particular department are not being done in a way that is mindful of safety.”
Gabe Monzo, executive director of the Westmoreland County Airport Authority, has been involved with aircraft rescue for his entire career.
Monzo got his job at the authority after volunteering as captain of the fire department serving the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Unity and working 25 years as a Pennsylvania State Fire Academy instructor for aircraft rescue.
“The good thing is they’re very few and far between,” he said of aviation accidents.
Despite concerned discourse on social media platforms increasing after the recent accidents, Monzo believes the crashes were pure coincidence — and there’s no connection between them.
“Would I have any problems getting on an aircraft? No,” he said. “They’re all very safe. There’s no airline that I know (that’s) better than the other, safer than the other.”
Most major airlines use the same manufacturers, with Airbus and Boeing being the most common, Monzo said.
“They all end up with turbulence from time to time,” he said, with the only difference being the airplane’s logo. “All fly the same.”
Kiernan said until the final reports come back from all of the recent aviation-related accidents, it will be unknown as to whether there’s a common thread.
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“Let’s not assume that and take a look,” she said. “I think if there does appear to be anything of concern that crops up in these investigations, there’s not going to be any hesitation to take action on that should that be the case.”
Trust the journey
Monzo said he still views flying as the safest mode of transportation.
Unlike all car accidents, which rarely even make local news headlines unless they’re fatal, aviation accidents never fail to make national headlines, according to Monzo.
“Everybody will hear about it as opposed to car accidents,” he said.
Driving worries Bayura more than flying, as it’s widely known that air travel is safer than car travel.
In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled, according to USAFacts, and the death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on U.S. highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles.
“You take a risk doing anything you’re doing,” Bayura said. “(It) won’t stop me from doing what I’m doing.”
The aviation-related accidents in 2025 aren’t related to one specific airline or geographic location, she said, and she doesn’t believe they’re related to politics.
“It could happen anywhere,”Bayura said.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told CBS News Wednesday that “of course” it’s still safe to fly.
“I do think as we look at the incidents or the crashes, it gives us an opportunity to say what went wrong?” he told the outlet. “What can we improve upon in the system off these crashes?”
Though Popp still hates flying, the accidents won’t stop him from traveling to his sister in Tampa next month, he said.
“It’s always bothered me,” he said. “You’re more in control when you’re driving. When you’re flying, it’s totally in the pilot’s hand.”
Until Philpot feels comfortable flying once again, she said she’s sticking to ground transportation.
“If I can avoid flying, I will,” she said, vowing that she will travel via air again eventually. “Confidence might come back if we go a couple months without a plane crash.”