Michael here: Are we losing the room?

Back in 2022, While I was Business Editor, I interviewed Ed Bolen for FLYING. He runs the National Business Aviation Association, so his whole job is standing up for the people who build and fly private jets, an industry most folks only ever see on the news, on its worst day. We talked about a lot of things. 

The part that stuck with me is this line: “aviation needs to be safe”, he said, “and we need to be perceived as safe.”

At the time, it sounded like something someone shaping aviation policy would say, but since then, it sounds like he saw the whole thing coming. Here’s what I mean. 

The last year and a half has been one long string of wreckage, and people noticed.

January 2025, an Army helicopter and a passenger jet hit each other in the air near Reagan National. Sixty-seven people gone. My college classmate, Jonathan Campos was the Captain of the regional jet.

Two days after that, a medical jet flying a twelve-year-old girl home to Mexico — she’d just finished months of treatment — dropped out of the sky over a Philadelphia neighborhood and killed everyone on board plus a man sitting in his car on the ground. It had been one of the most frightening accidents I’d seen.

Then, a few weeks later a Delta regional jet came into Toronto too hard, tore off a wing, and flipped onto its back. Everybody walked away from that one, but it didn’t matter, because the picture on every screen was an airliner upside down on the runway, on fire.

Then it kept going. 

June, an Air India 787 went down seconds after takeoff and killed more than 260 people, one of the worst crashes in years, and a year later there’s still no final report explaining it. This past March, an Air Canada jet landed at LaGuardia right into a fire truck that a controller had just waved across the runway. Both pilots died — the first people killed at LaGuardia in 34 years — and the controller was caught on the radio saying, out loud, “I messed up.” 

And then this week alone: a B-52 down on a test flight Monday, eight dead; a skydiving plane down in Missouri on Sunday, twelve dead; and on Tuesday night a NetJets business jet on a highway outside Laredo, Texas, after the crew called in a mechanical problem. One of the six aboard didn’t make it, a beloved tech businessman. Strangers ran at the burning plane with a sledgehammer and a shovel to get people out. 

Three crashes in three days.

Now, a lot of these have nothing to do with each other mechanically. 

They’re different failures in different parts of the system. 

At the end of 2024, in South Korea, a plane slid off the end of a runway at Muan and hit a concrete wall that was supposed to crumple and didn’t — a survivable overrun turned into a fire that killed 179. 

In Louisville, the metal lugs holding an engine onto a freighter’s wing had cracked from years of stress, the kind of thing you only catch if you’re looking hard for it. 

In Washington, a helicopter route was drawn too close to where the jets land. They don’t add up to one tidy story. They add up to a feeling, which is a different thing.

And here’s the strange part. Planes actually crashed less often in 2025 than in 2024. 

The accident rate went down. But more people died, because the crashes that did happen were bigger. Think about your own neighborhood. You can have fewer fender-benders this year overall, but if the one wreck that happens is a pileup at highway speed with people killed, the roads feel deadlier, not safer. Your gut runs on the pileup, not the spreadsheet. Nobody remembers the millions of flights that landed fine. They remember the smoke.

So that moved people. In one year, the share of Americans who say flying is safe dropped from 71 percent to 64 percent. The minute those early-2025 crashes hit, Google searches asking whether it’s safe to fly shot up. People who used to walk onto a plane without a second thought started checking the tail number and texting each other from the gate.

So, that drop is the actual story. Not whether the planes are safe. Whether people believe they are.

If your whole business depends on people choosing to get on the plane, then what they believe is the thing you’re selling. You can be completely right about the accident rate and still lose the guy who decides to drive, or take the train, or just stay home. That’s Bolen’s point. Those are two different jobs. You can nail the first one and blow the second, and blowing the second costs you just as much.

There’s actually a name for this, and it’s worth knowing because it turns a bumper sticker into a real argument. Sociologists call it the Thomas theorem, and it goes back to 1928: if people treat a situation as real, it’s real in its consequences. A belief doesn’t have to be true to change what people do. It just has to be believed. Perception is reality.

And, if you give me some leeway here, you can see it in the money. 

In the weeks after those January crashes, the big airlines watched their spring bookings sag, and they admitted it. Delta’s CEO came out and said the strong quarter he’d promised wasn’t happening. American, Southwest, United all walked back their numbers. American went a step further and cut flights at Reagan National specifically, and pointed at the January crash as one reason people were avoiding the place. 

I’ll be straight with you: fear wasn’t the only thing pulling demand down. 

Tariffs, recession nerves, less government travel, softer overseas bookings — all of that was happening at the same time, and anybody who claims they perfectly separated the crash fear from the rest is guessing. But the airlines themselves put the crashes on the list. So seven points isn’t just a mood. It’s emptier planes, cut flights, a harder time hiring the next batch of controllers and mechanics, and a regulator now trying to run things in front of a scared crowd instead of a calm one.

Which is why the useful question isn’t “is flying safe.” It’s “why did so many people decide it wasn’t — and what did the industry do to earn that.”

So, there’s the uncomfortable answer. People aren’t making it up. They’re picking up on something real and then drawing a big conclusion from it.

Take the one that should scare everybody, the Reagan National collision. The easy story is two crews who screwed up. That’s not what investigators found. They traced it back to the FAA itself — helicopter routes laid out too close to where the jets come in, a system leaning on pilots to just look out the window and spot each other, and warning signs sitting in the agency’s own data that nobody acted on. 

The head of the FAA later admitted they’d failed to move on what they already knew. That’s not a fluke. That’s a bad blueprint finally catching up with the people flying through it. 

LaGuardia was the same shape of problem: a truck on the runway with no transponder, ground radar that didn’t warn anyone, a controller buried under too much at once. Not one person’s mistake. A bunch of safety nets that were supposed to catch it, and didn’t.

And people are right about one more thing they can’t quite put into words. “Aviation” isn’t one thing. 

Some corners of it really are more dangerous than others.

The big airlines — the 180-seat jet you take to a wedding — are incredibly safe, and getting safer. In the industry that’s Part 121, and the math is almost silly: you could fly every day for thousands of years before the odds came for you. But airlines are just one slice of what’s up there. The rest plays by very different numbers.

General aviation — the small private planes, the weekend pilots, the flight schools — runs about fourteen times the per-hour death rate of driving. Zoom in on personal flights, the family trips and the fly-out-for-a-burger runs, and it’s more like twenty-seven times driving. That’s worse, hour for hour, than a motorcycle. So when you hear someone say a little private plane is more dangerous than your car, that’s not a scare line. Per hour in the air, it’s just true.

Then there’s the middle slice not widely talked about: charter, air taxi, air ambulance, sightseeing flights. The feds call it Part 135. The NTSB went back and looked at more than 500 accidents in that world between 2010 and 2022 and found real soft spots — in how flights get sent out, who’s actually in charge, how planes get loaded, how any of it gets watched. That Philadelphia medical jet? Part 135. Its cockpit voice recorder, it turned out, hadn’t worked in years.

But to be fair, the point isn’t that all private flying is a death trap. 

The professional end of it — corporate flight departments, the well-run business-jet outfits — is about as safe as the airlines. Fractional operators like NetJets built their whole name on that record. Which is exactly why last night stings: by one industry count, the Laredo crash was the first time NetJets ever lost a passenger. The gold standard of private flying just lost somebody, on a highway, on camera, the same week I sat down to argue that perception is the entire ballgame.

So the numbers don’t say “everything’s falling apart.” 

They say something the public already feels in its gut without the words for it: that one little word, “aviation,” is hiding a huge range of risk. 

And when all of it gets dumped into the same mental bucket labeled crash, a business jet on a Texas highway and an airliner over the Potomac end up feeding the exact same fear. The crashes were real. The weak spots were real. The people who died were real. 

The public has the rate wrong and the unease right.

But let’s be clear, Seven points isn’t a collapse. 

Most Americans still say flying is safe. And confidence has dipped after every bad stretch anybody can remember — after the 737 MAX groundings, after every rough summer — and it’s always climbed right back, because the everyday safety reasserts itself and the cameras move on to the next thing. 

By that reading, this is a bruise, not a break. Leave it alone and it heals.

That’s the comforting version, which might be right. But it’s betting that the thing that always healed the wound still works. The MAX recovered back when the official explanation still showed up before the public had made up its mind. That’s the part that’s gone. Trust used to rebuild in the quiet after a crash. There isn’t any quiet anymore.

Which gets at the real mistake: the industry keeps treating all this fear like a PR headache instead of the actual emergency.

When the official answer to a crash takes anywhere from a year to three years to land, the silence fills up with other stuff. Grainy phone footage. Cable guests guessing. The guy in your feed who’s decided he knows why the engines quit. Air India is the cleanest example of this — a year out, no final report, so every theory anybody felt like posting just poured into the gap. 

By the time the careful, thorough report finally arrives and explains exactly what broke and how they fixed it, people have already spent a year and a half stewing. The investigators are slow because they’re careful, which is good. The algorithm is fast because it doesn’t care whether it’s right. 

Aviation keeps showing up to a three-day fight with a three-year process.

And the people whose job is to calm everyone down keep reaching for the same tool — the statistic. Flying’s still the safest way to travel. True. Doesn’t work. You can’t talk somebody out of being scared with a per-million-departures number, because the fear was never built out of numbers in the first place. It was built out of a smoking runway and nobody explaining it. 

That second job Bolen was talking about — the perception job — is the one that means showing up fast, saying what you actually know before you know all of it, and treating people’s worry like it’s reasonable instead of a mix-up you have to correct.

Nobody’s doing that job. The FAA spent months after Reagan National playing defense instead of getting out front. The airlines reached for the safety stat. The truth is the perception problem doesn’t live anywhere on the org chart — it belongs to everybody, which means it belongs to nobody. They’re acing the first job and assuming it covers the second. It doesn’t.

So what would actually fix it? 

Not a slicker ad campaign. A different way of behaving when things go wrong.

Start with speed and plain talk. The first 48 hours after a crash are when trust is won or lost, and right now the industry goes quiet exactly when everyone is paying the most attention. You don’t have to name a cause you don’t have yet. You can stand up the same day and say, in normal human words, here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t, here’s what we’re checking, and here’s when we’ll talk to you again. Then keep showing up. The vacuum is the enemy, so stop leaving one.

Give the perception problem an owner. Right now no single person wakes up responsible for whether the flying public trusts the system. Someone should — inside the FAA, inside every major carrier. Not a spokesperson reading a statement, but a real principal whose job is the public’s confidence, with the standing to get in front of a camera fast and the authority to mean it.

Be honest about the parts that aren’t airlines. The fastest way to lose people is to answer a charter or helicopter or commuter crash with airline statistics, because anybody can feel the dodge. Name the difference. Tell people that the big airlines are extraordinarily safe and that some of the smaller operations have real work to do, and then show the work — the Part 135 fixes, the tighter oversight. Treating people like they can handle the truth is itself a confidence move.

And close the gap on the slow stuff that scares people. Speed up the preliminary findings even when the full report takes years. Push the fixes that are sitting in old NTSB recommendations — the runway routes, the ground radar, the transponders on airport vehicles, the controller staffing — because every one of those that gets done is one less crash that has to get explained later. The best perception strategy in the long run is boring: fix the thing before it kills someone, then tell people you did.

Here’s my prediction, which I even hate to put that energy out there. Before this year is out, there could be another crash or near-miss big enough to make the news, and the public reaction is going to outrun the facts by weeks, because the facts will show up last again. The share of people who call flying safe will not climb back to 71 percent. The industry will answer with one more round of we’re-still-the-safest-way-to-travel, and it’ll land the same way it lands now, which is to say it won’t.

I keep coming back to that 2022 conversation. Bolen was telling me the harder half of his own job, the half no maintenance schedule or rerouted helicopter corridor can fix. 

You can build the safest machines human beings have ever made and still lose the room.

Feedback, thoughts, suggestions? Hit the reply!

Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company, home of Massif & Kroo. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine, writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation. Now he focused on building permanent-capital companies focused on long-term trends in business, media and aviation. Based in Arlington, Virginia.

Connect: mikewildes.com

Email: [email protected]

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