Small plane crashes in Northeast Philadelphia
60 comments
·January 31, 2025echoangle
sonofhans
Twenty-odd years ago there was a rash of US politicians killed in aircraft accidents. This seems like a good source — look at the cluster in late 90s, early 00s - https://politicalgraveyard.com/death/aircraft.html
Very few since then, so it’s much more of an outlier now.
krunck
Anybody got statistics on air crashes in the US so we can see if the anomaly is only in the attention the crashes receive and not the frequency at which they are happening?
jonas21
Small planes crash all the time:
https://asn.flightsafety.org/asndb/year/2025/1
Even if you only consider fatal crashes in the US, the last one before the DC incident was just this past Saturday.
cozzyd
I know small planes crash a lot, but I feel like small jets crashing is a bit more notable? Maybe just because there arent that many comparatively.
angoragoats
The last fatal commercial aircraft accident in the US prior to Trump’s Potomac disaster was in 2022, and the one before that was in 2020. There have now been two in the last week, since the FAA administrator was asked to leave by an unelected private citizen, and all of the ATCs were offered a buyout to leave their jobs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_...
ceejayoz
No, the last one was in 2009. 16 year streak for US airlines.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/01/30/business/us-airlines-warn...
> US airlines had gone 16 years without a fatal crash until Wednesday night.
There’ve been a few fatal incidents, but not crashes for the actual airlines.
duskwuff
In the interest of precision: those were the last fatal commercial aircraft accidents. Fatal aircraft crashes in private aircraft are more frequent.
iterance
Edit: Incorrect.
Original comment: Any plane crash in the US is unusual and significant.
jmward01
I'd argue that the fact that it isn't frequent makes it insignificant. 40k people die every year on the roads and, to our detriment, we don't treat that as significant. I wish we would focus on things actually impacting people and not scare people with things that will never happen to them.
mostlysimilar
Whatever the cause truly is, any and all aviation disasters in the US will further increase scrutiny of Musk gutting the FAA.
DiggyJohnson
Why and how are these things related? I acknowledge you’re making an observation and not an argument.
angoragoats
The FAA administrator left his post after Musk asked him to, on January 20. The FAA had no administrator until Trump appointed one, only after the plane and helicopter crashed into the Potomac. The lack of leadership at the FAA could not have helped the situation, even if it was not a direct cause of it.
toomuchtodo
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-admin-emails-air-traffic...
> Air traffic controllers were emailed by the Trump administration urging them to quit their jobs and take mass “buyouts” just 24 hours after the D.C. plane crash. They were among hundreds of thousands of federal workers sent the email at 8.30 p.m. Thursday to push the extraordinary offer by Trump’s aides to get civil servants to quit en masse. The email dropped almost exactly 24 hours after an Army helicopter crashed into an American Airlines jet as it came into land at Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people. Just one air traffic controller was doing the work of two controllers at the time, early reports have suggested.
FAA Faces Controller Staffing Challenges as Air Traffic Operations Return to Pre-Pandemic Levels at Critical Facilities [OIG Report AV2023035] - https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/FAA%20Controller... - June 21, 2023
Airline Close Calls Happen Far More Often Than Previously Known - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/21/business/airl... | https://archive.today/5qabt - August 21, 2023
Drunk and Asleep on the Job: Air Traffic Controllers Pushed to the Brink - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-cont... | https://archive.today/h4gjo - December 2, 2023
The ATC labor force was already stretched thin before this. Tired, overworked humans make mistakes. There is no slack in the system, and it's being pushed further towards failure. Safe travels.
listenallyall
Sutely, when there is a head of the FAA, that person occasionally takes a vacation or other time off. These plane crashes are totally unrelated to politics or staffing.
Tycho
You are saying essentially that the authority in question was incredibly mismanaged and incapable if its staff would perform worse in their critical functions just because of some personnel changes at the top a few days prior.
ahiknsr
> In April 2023, Whitaker grounded SpaceX for months after Starship’s maiden launch and only allowed a second attempt after an extensive investigation lasting until September of that year yielded 63 corrective actions to be taken.
> “He needs to resign,” Musk wrote late last year, in response to one of his fans criticizing what he believed to be the FAA’s unwarranted meddling in the entrepreneur’s affairs.
https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/faa-chris-rocheleau-elon-musk...
cdme
I can't see how Musk could possibly improve the FAA. He'll gut it and deflect blame.
_DeadFred_
The FAA dared try and fine SpaceX. Musk has had an agenda against the FAA since before Trump took office.
HumblyTossed
Nobody is going to be left to scrutinize anything much less have any power to do anything about it. If anyone is still doubting that we're under a full scale takeover of our country, get your head out of your ass.
tomrod
Yeah, but that's one tiny area where Musk and Trump have caused recent chaos.
Just today, social security servers, websites, etc. Treasury department systems.
greenavocado
Why did it look like it was going Mach 1 into the ground?
null
metadat
Where did you see this footage?
unsnap_biceps
in the article embed, around 52 seconds in has some video, it does appear to come in very fast.
kali_00
[dead]
jeffbee
Photographer on the spot: https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/live/plane-crash-...
metadat
Higher resolution version:
https://www.inquirer.com/resizer/v2/6OXRZY6NOJD3VBA7FMNIIKCI...
Is there something especially significant about this crash? Or is this only because there was a large crash recently?