‘Absolutely safe’ to continue flying, safety experts insist following Delta crash

While it’s “certainly understandable” that these incidents cause concern, “we have a safe air transportation system in this country,” he said. “In 2024, 9.5 billion people traveled by air globally.”

The fact that there were no fatalities on Monday reflects aviation safety systems working as they were designed, he said, from seat design to flight attendant training.

Just one of the 21 passengers who had been transported to local hospitals remained there as of Wednesday morning, according to Delta.

The National Safety Council calls commercial air travel “among the safest modes of transportation” and estimated the “lifetime odds of dying in an aircraft in the United States was too small to calculate.”

Dying in a car crash is much more likely. Americans have about a 1% chance of dying from one during their lifetime, according to the council.

An estimated 29,135 people died in traffic crashes during the first nine months of 2024, according to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The chance of dying during a commercial flight has been dropping by a factor of two every decade since the 1960s, according to MIT researchers. The risk of a fatality from commercial air travel was 1 per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally in the 2018-2022 period.

Still, an AP-NORC poll this month found that surveyed Americans' confidence in flying safety dipped slightly after the D.C. crash.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal government are hitting the Federal Aviation Administration, including the firing of fewer than 400 employees last week.

However, the Delta crash occurred in Canada.

Plus, a DOT spokesperson on Monday said the FAA had retained employees who “perform safety critical functions” including air traffic control.

‘Just bad luck’

The fact that the two most recent U.S. accidents involved Bombardier CRJ aircraft commonly used by regional carriers “was just bad luck,” said Capt. Ross Aimer, a retired United Airlines pilot and CEO of Aero Consulting Experts.

Alan Armstrong, an aviation attorney in Atlanta, agreed. The DCA accident, on a CRJ-700, was “a completely different animal. They probably have nothing to do with each other, nothing in the world.”

“It is absolutely safe to fly on a CRJ. I would not hesitate to get on one.”

Shahidi said regional carriers have the same standards as mainline carriers when it comes to training, safety and operating procedures.

“There are simply a lot of these regional carriers flying,” he said.

About 31% of scheduled passenger departures in the U.S. were regional service in 2023, according to the Regional Airline Association.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian confirmed to CBS on Wednesday that it was an “experienced crew” on board and that there is “one level of safety” between Delta’s mainline and regional jets.

The CRJ-900 involved in Monday’s crash makes up the majority of Endeavor Air’s fleet, and it has never had a fatal incident in its nearly 25-year history, according to the Aviation Safety Network database.

Endeavor, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta, says it has the “world’s largest fleet” of CRJ-900s, which seat 76 passengers. Delta over the years has phased out 50-seat regional jets in favor of larger aircraft.

The aircraft was developed by Bombardier, a Canadian aerospace company, but the CRJ program was sold to Mitsubishi in 2019. CRJs “revolutionized regional travel by connecting smaller cities to major hubs,” per Bombardier’s website.

Mitsubishi representatives were on-site in Toronto after the accident, officials said Tuesday. Endeavor’s CEO Jim Graham also traveled there.

Bombardier directed requests for comment to Mitsubishi, which did not respond to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s query.

Delta’s regional operation, Delta Connection, contracts with three carriers: SkyWest Airlines, Republic Airways and Endeavor, which is the only one owned by the Atlanta-based airline.

Endeavor operates about 700 daily flights to destinations across the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean. It employs 1,540 pilots and 1,700 flight attendants.

Aimer, who did not personally pilot regional jets, said commuter airline pilots “go through the school of hard knocks pretty quickly” given their high volume of short flights.

“The time it took for me to fly my 747 from Los Angeles to Tokyo, those fellows land five, six times in inclement weather, in the winter time in the northeast or the summer thunderstorms.”

Endeavor came to be when Delta invested $52 million in what was then known as Pinnacle Airlines in 2013 as that regional carrier was in bankruptcy.

Delta renamed Pinnacle to Endeavor as it became a full subsidiary and moved its headquarters to Minneapolis, an existing Delta hub.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with the latest number of injured passengers who remained hospitalized.

Staff writer Sara Gregory contributed reporting.