Plane Crash Statistics: What the Official Numbers Show and What They Mean

What U.S. Plane Crash Statistics Actually Count, and Where Your Flight Fits

This resource gathers the official U.S. civil aviation accident figures and explains them in plain English. It also sets out what those figures can and cannot say to a family or an injured passenger.

Three federal agencies produce the numbers people usually find, and knowing which one a figure comes from helps a family judge what it can and cannot say about their flight. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is the independent federal agency that investigates civil aviation accidents and keeps the public accident database. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is the agency that regulates civil aviation and tracks its own safety data. Federal law directs the FAA to consider "assigning, maintaining, and enhancing safety and security as the highest priorities in air commerce" (49 U.S.C. § 40101(d)(1)). If you come across a figure from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), it is a third official source, mainly for airline traffic and air carrier data, so it may describe airline activity rather than accidents. The figures on this page come from the NTSB.

Civil aviation means non-military flying. It covers airlines, charters, private planes, helicopters and flight schools. Military accidents are not in these counts. An event is counted only if it meets the NTSB's meaning of an accident: an occurrence involving death, serious injury or substantial damage to the aircraft. Whether an event meets that threshold decides whether it shows up in the accident data at all. That, in turn, shapes what anyone looking into it later can find in the public record. For a family, this means the first question about any crash is often whether it was recorded as an accident, because that determines whether the NTSB's public file is a place where information about it may appear.

When you look for your own flight in the numbers, it helps to know that the NTSB summary sorts every accident into one of three operational categories. Each describes a different kind of flying:

• General aviation, which covers private planes, small aircraft, many flight-school and experimental flights, and other flying outside commercial carriage.
• Part 135 on-demand operations, which covers charters, air taxis, air tours and air medical flights.
• Part 121 scheduled operations, which covers the scheduled airlines.

Part 135 and Part 121 are the FAA rule sets that decide which safety requirements applied to a flight. If you are trying to understand an accident, finding which category it falls into is the first step in reading the numbers. A sightseeing helicopter and a scheduled jet sit in different rows. The category also points to which set of federal safety requirements applied to the flight, which is one of the facts an attorney may look at when sorting out what happened.

People searching for helicopter crash statistics often expect a separate line for helicopters. The NTSB's Table 1 does not break them out. Helicopters are counted inside the general aviation or on-demand figures, depending on how they were operated. If your family's accident involved a helicopter tour or an air medical flight, the relevant row is likely the on-demand figure; a privately flown helicopter would generally sit in general aviation.

Before going further, a family may find it useful to note a few basic facts that tie their flight to these categories: who operated the flight, what kind of trip it was (private, charter, tour, medical or airline), and the type of aircraft. Those details decide where the flight sits in the table and are also among the first things a conversation with an attorney would cover.

How the NTSB Builds Its Database and What Its Timeline Means for Your Family

The figures come from one source: the NTSB file AviationAccidentStatistics_2005-2024_20260112.xlsx, Table 1. The file is dated January 12, 2026. Each figure here is copied from that table's rows exactly as the table gives it.

An accident enters the NTSB's records when the agency is notified. After that, the investigation moves through stages:

1. The NTSB is notified of the accident.
2. Investigators may go to the site to gather information. They look at the aircraft, its records, air traffic control data and other sources.
3. A preliminary report is issued. This is an early factual summary that may record the aircraft type, the location, the number of people aboard and initial observations. It does not find a cause.
4. A factual record is assembled as the work continues.
5. A final report is issued. It may include the NTSB's probable cause.

Probable cause is the NTSB's determination of the factor or factors most likely responsible for an accident. It is the agency's investigative conclusion, made for safety purposes. It is not a court's finding that anyone is legally liable. Investigations of complex accidents can take months or years before a final report issues. Reports are searchable through the NTSB's public Aviation Accident Database on ntsb.gov.

For a family, the length of that timeline matters. Waiting for a final report can feel like waiting for an answer, but the final report is a safety conclusion, not a ruling on responsibility. State law sets its own filing deadlines for injury and death claims, and those deadlines are separate from the NTSB's schedule. A family who waits for the NTSB to finish before learning about those deadlines may find the two calendars do not line up.

Looking Up an Accident in the NTSB Database

A family who wants to follow an investigation in the public record can generally work through these steps, using what the article above describes:

1. Gather the basics of the flight: the date, the location, the aircraft type and the operator.
2. Search the NTSB's public Aviation Accident Database on ntsb.gov using those details.
3. Check which stage the record has reached: a preliminary report, a developing factual record, or a final report.
4. Read the preliminary report, if one has issued, as early factual information only, not as a finding of cause.
5. Note whether a final report and a probable cause have issued, keeping in mind that complex investigations can take months or years.

Why NTSB Reports Cannot Be the Backbone of a Claim

One federal rule shapes how a family can use this material. Under 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b), "No part of a report of the Board, related to an accident or an investigation of an accident, may be admitted into evidence or used in a civil action for damages resulting from a matter mentioned in the report." The same section also restricts how parties in court may obtain cockpit and surface vehicle recorder recordings, transcripts and still images, subject to the conditions it sets out.

For someone affected by a crash, this means the database is informational. It can help a family understand the timeline and the factual record of an investigation. A civil case, however, is built on its own evidence, and a plane crash lawsuit runs separately from the NTSB's work. Federal aviation law and state tort law are two distinct layers. The NTSB's process belongs to the first. A claim for injury or death generally belongs to the second.

In practical terms, this creates a possible evidentiary gap. A family may read a report that seems to explain the crash, yet that report cannot be used as proof in a civil action for damages. Any claim would depend on evidence gathered on its own, such as records, photos, witnesses and the physical facts of the accident. That is why the reports, photos and witness details a family already has may matter, and why questions about how such evidence is collected and preserved are often part of an early conversation with an attorney.

The 2024 Numbers and What They May Mean If Your Family Was Affected

The NTSB's Table 1 gives these 2024 figures. Each is reported for the 2024 calendar year and the stated category. They are counts across the whole category. None of them is a finding about any company, operator or aircraft.

Three terms are used in the table:

• A fatal accident is an accident in which at least one person died.
• Fatalities is the total number of deaths.
• Fatalities aboard counts only people who were on the aircraft.

The gap between the total and the "aboard" figure reflects deaths of people who were not on the aircraft, such as people on the ground. For U.S. civil aviation in 2024, that gap is 321 total and 316 aboard. If someone you love was on the ground rather than aboard the aircraft, their death would be part of that difference.

The figures are as of the file date, January 12, 2026. The NTSB updates its database as investigations close, so later versions may differ.

General aviation accident statistics make up most of the total: 1,126 of 1,201 accidents. That share reflects how large and varied the general aviation fleet is. These counts alone are not a per-flight risk comparison with commercial aviation, because Table 1 as given here reports accidents, not flights or hours flown. For a family, this means the table cannot say whether a particular kind of flight was more or less dangerous than another; it only shows how many accidents were recorded in each row.

Reading the Numbers When You or Someone You Love Was in an Accident

If your family's accident is one of the 188 fatal accidents of 2024, or one of the many where people were hurt, the table places it in a national picture. That is all it does. The statistics are a public resource, not a legal finding.

Who may be responsible for an accident depends on its own facts. Those facts include the aircraft, the type of operation, who operated, owned, built and maintained the aircraft, and the law that applies.

Federal law governs aviation safety regulation. State tort law, the law of civil wrongs, generally governs claims for injury and death. State rules differ from state to state, including:

• limitation periods (filing deadlines),
• comparative or contributory fault (how a person's own share of fault affects a claim),
• damages caps, and
• wrongful-death rules.

Wrongful death is a civil claim a family brings after a death caused by another party's conduct or by a defective product. Separate pages explain plane crash survivor injuries and the categories of plane crash compensation the law may allow.

If you are weighing what the category of your flight, the NTSB's status and your state's rules may mean together, you may want to consider requesting a case evaluation with our attorney. It is a conversation about what happened and what those facts may involve. It is not a promise of any outcome.

What the Statistics Cannot Tell You About Your Flight

The counts include accidents only, so some events that matter to a family may never appear in them. An incident is a less severe occurrence that does not meet the accident threshold. If you are looking for an event that did not cause death, serious injury or substantial damage, it would be tracked separately as an incident and would not show up in the accident totals. The same is true of near-misses and safety concerns reported through voluntary channels outside these counts, including the FAA Aviation Safety Hotline and NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). A search of the accident figures alone would not reveal them.

The data covers U.S. civil aviation. Foreign-registered aircraft operating in the United States may be investigated differently. The figures also lag behind events. The 2024 numbers are as of January 12, 2026, and some 2024 investigations may still be open, without a final report or a probable cause. If your family's accident is among them, the public record may be incomplete for some time.

These gaps matter if you are trying to learn about a particular aircraft, operator or route. A lack of prior accidents in the database means no qualifying accident was recorded. It does not mean no safety concerns existed. A family asking whether an operator had a history of problems may find that the accident database is only one part of the picture.

The statistics also describe patterns across the whole fleet. They do not establish what caused any individual accident or who is responsible for it. An injury does not prove anyone's fault, and a crash does not prove a defect. A claim asks about specific things: a duty, a breach of that duty, causation and damages, or a defect and causation. Whether those are met depends on the facts.

That is the central point for someone in this position: whether a claim exists depends on facts that are not in any table. The details of the flight, the aircraft's history, the operator, the people involved and the applicable state rules all sit outside the statistics. Questions a family may weigh include what records and photos they have, who saw the accident, and which state's law may apply. Those are the kinds of questions an attorney can help sort through.

This resource never determines fault, liability, a deadline or what a case is worth. No reliable average applies to aviation cases, as the page on plane crash settlement amounts explains. This page also does not cover any one state's rules, the law of international flights, or how a particular investigation is proceeding.