A Plane Crash Is Dominating The News. Should You Still Get On Your Flight?

Editor’s Note: This editorial draws on more than 25 years of independent travel, first-hand experience and publicly documented evidence and regulatory changes. Many of these editorials were written years before the issues became mainstream, and have been updated to reflect current developments while remaining true to their original arguments.

A plane crash is dominating the news. The television coverage is relentless, social media is full of speculation and dramatic footage is everywhere you look. You have a flight booked in the coming days or weeks, and suddenly a question that never crossed your mind before feels impossible to ignore.

Should I still fly?

If that’s why you’re here, you’re certainly not alone. Every time a major aviation accident makes headlines, thousands of travellers ask themselves exactly the same question, and honestly? It’s a completely understandable reaction. Air crashes are shocking, deeply tragic events, and seeing them replayed across every news channel and social media feed can make flying suddenly feel far more dangerous than it really is.

This article was originally written in December 2014, in the immediate aftermath of the disappearance of AirAsia Flight QZ8501. At the time, there were many more questions than answers, and understandably so. There have been a small handful of major incidents that have hit the news since then. The names and headlines may have changed over the years, but the question travellers ask whenever an aviation accident occurs has remained exactly the same.

Interestingly, the advice I gave back then has only become more relevant with time.

Every major aviation accident is followed by an intense wave of media coverage, endless speculation and understandable public anxiety. Yet time and again, official investigations have reinforced the same conclusion: commercial aviation learns from every accident, continually improves its safety standards and remains one of the safest forms of transport ever created.

That doesn’t mean dismissing tragedy or pretending accidents never happen. They do, and every loss of life is heartbreaking. But it does mean understanding risk properly instead of allowing fear to distort it.

I’ve spent much of my life travelling to places other people told me were ‘too dangerous’. Time after time, I discovered that reality was far more nuanced than the headlines suggested. That’s a philosophy that has shaped not only my travels, but also my approach to travel health and safety. The goal has never been to ignore risk; it’s to understand it, prepare sensibly and make informed decisions instead of fearful ones.

So if a recent plane crash has left you wondering whether you should still get on your flight, let’s put the headlines into perspective, separate fear from facts and help you travel with confidence again.

Why Plane Crashes Affect Us So Deeply

When a commercial aircraft crashes, it captures our attention in a way that few other tragedies do. Even people who rarely think twice about flying suddenly find themselves watching every news update, refreshing live blogs and questioning whether they should still get on their next flight.

That reaction is entirely human.

Part of the reason is that plane crashes are so unexpected. Commercial aviation has become so safe and so reliable that most of us board an aircraft with the perfectly reasonable expectation that we’ll arrive safely a few hours later. We don’t spend the journey worrying about whether the aircraft will make it to its destination because, almost every single time, it does.

It is precisely because serious aviation accidents are so rare that they feel so shocking when they happen. They shatter our expectations. Something we had come to regard as routine suddenly becomes headline news, making the event feel even more extraordinary.

The scale of modern media coverage amplifies those emotions. A single accident often involves many people, dramatic images and an international response, meaning it dominates television broadcasts, newspaper front pages and social media feeds around the world. Updates continue around the clock, while speculation, opinion and misinformation spread almost as quickly as verified facts.

Back in 2014, Air Asia flight QZ8501 from Indonesia to Singapore crashed into the Java Sea, killing everyone on board. Given the closeness of the timings to the ill fated Malaysian airlines flight MH370 which vanished over the South China Sea, and flight MH17 which was shot down over Eastern Ukraine during active combat, media sensationalism was off the scale. There were of course huge outpourings of sympathy all over social media, and even backlash against mainstream media for their constant reporting and unedited footage of wreckage and bodies.

That constant exposure can make it feel as though flying has suddenly become much more dangerous. Especially when events happen relatively close together, and that does affect many peoples perception of safety and willingness to fly. In reality, what has changed isn’t the underlying level of risk, it’s the amount of attention being paid to a single, tragic event.

Understanding that distinction is important because our perception of risk is often influenced far more by emotion than by probability. The more we see something, the more common it begins to feel, even when the opposite is actually true.

That doesn’t mean you should ignore your feelings. Feeling unsettled after seeing distressing news coverage is a completely natural response. It does, however, mean it’s worth taking a step back before allowing those emotions to make decisions on your behalf.

The next step is to put those headlines into their proper context. Because while a plane crash may dominate the news for days or even weeks, it tells you remarkably little about the safety of the millions of flights taking off and landing safely around the world every year.

The Headlines Don’t Tell The Whole Story

One of the biggest mistakes we can make after a major aviation accident is assuming that extensive news coverage reflects an increase in risk.

It doesn’t. It reflects an increase in attention.

When something as rare and shocking as a commercial plane crash occurs, it quite rightly becomes a major international story. News organisations devote days or even weeks to covering every new development, experts are interviewed around the clock and social media fills with footage, opinions and endless discussion. If you’re following the story closely, it can begin to feel as though aviation has suddenly become much more dangerous than it was only a few days earlier.

In reality, nothing has fundamentally changed.

The vast majority of commercial flights continue to depart and arrive exactly as they always do: safely, routinely and with little more than the occasional delay or lost suitcase. Those flights simply aren’t newsworthy. No television crew reports on the thousands of aircraft that land safely every day because safe, uneventful journeys are exactly what passengers expect.

This is one of the reasons aviation accidents can distort our perception of risk. We naturally judge how common something is by how often we encounter it. When every news bulletin, newspaper and social media feed is talking about the same tragic event, it’s easy to conclude that flying has suddenly become less safe. In truth, what you’re witnessing is the exceptional event that has broken an otherwise remarkably consistent pattern.

It’s also worth remembering that commercial aviation is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world. Airlines, aircraft manufacturers, maintenance organisations, pilots, engineers and air traffic controllers all operate within multiple layers of oversight, training and safety systems designed to prevent accidents long before passengers ever step on board. No system created by humans can ever eliminate risk entirely, but modern aviation has spent decades building layer upon layer of protection to reduce that risk as far as reasonably possible.

That doesn’t make accidents any less tragic when they do occur. Every loss of life is devastating, and every accident deserves to be investigated thoroughly. But it does mean that a single accident should never be viewed in isolation as evidence that flying has suddenly become unsafe.

In fact, one of the reasons commercial aviation has achieved such an extraordinary safety record is that it refuses to treat accidents as isolated tragedies. Every one becomes an opportunity to understand exactly what happened, learn from it and make flying even safer for everyone else.

That is something we’ll come back to shortly.

How To Separate Fear From Facts

In the hours and days after a serious aviation accident, the demand for immediate answers collides with an unavoidable reality: reliable answers take time. News organisations have airtime to fill, social media rewards confident opinions and every fragment of information is examined long before investigators have established how—or even whether—it fits into the wider picture.

That does not mean you need to ignore the coverage or avoid every discussion about what may have happened. It means placing what you hear in its proper context and recognising the enormous difference between an emerging possibility, a preliminary fact and a conclusion supported by a completed investigation.

Early Reports Are Incomplete By Their Very Nature

The first reports after any major accident are assembled from whatever information is immediately available. That may include eyewitness accounts, airport information, flight-tracking data, images of wreckage, statements from officials and fragments of communication from the airline or emergency services. Some of it may eventually prove important, but none of it provides the complete picture on its own.

Even official preliminary reports should not be mistaken for final conclusions. The US National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, explicitly describes preliminary information as subject to change, while its initial reports contain the factual information gathered during the earliest stage of an investigation rather than a definitive cause. Determining probable cause and identifying contributing factors comes later, after the evidence has been examined and analysed in full.

This is why apparently significant details can change as an investigation progresses. Early reports may be corrected, timelines may be refined and information that initially seemed central may turn out to have little bearing on the accident. That is not necessarily evidence of a cover-up, incompetence or conflicting stories. More often, it is simply what happens when a complex investigation replaces an incomplete early picture with better evidence.

Speculation Is Not The Same As Evidence

Television panels, news reports, podcasts, YouTube videos and social media discussions often feature pilots, engineers, former investigators and other people with genuine aviation knowledge. Their expertise may help explain how an aircraft system works, what investigators are likely to examine or why a particular scenario is technically possible.

What they cannot do, however, is determine the cause of an accident before the relevant evidence has been collected and analysed.

A commentator may be entirely correct about what could have happened and still be wrong about what did happen. The same observable outcome can have several possible causes, and individual clues can be misleading when separated from the aircraft’s recorded data, maintenance history, operating environment and the sequence of events leading up to the accident.

That does not make informed discussion worthless, nor does it mean you should distrust everyone who appears on television or online. It simply means treating speculation as speculation. A responsible expert will usually be clear about the limits of what is known, distinguish possibilities from established facts and avoid claiming certainty that the available evidence cannot support.

The people worth being most cautious of are not necessarily those who speculate, but those who announce a definitive explanation almost immediately. Confidence may make an opinion sound convincing, but it does not turn that opinion into evidence.

Look At What The Authoritative Sources Are Actually Saying

In the immediate aftermath of an accident, the most reliable information will generally come from the official accident investigation authority leading the inquiry, supported where relevant by aviation regulators, emergency services, the airline and the aircraft manufacturer. Which organisation leads depends largely on where the accident occurred and the circumstances involved.

International investigations are governed by standards established through Annex 13 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation. Responsibility normally rests with the state where the accident occurred, which appoints an independent specialist authority and may involve accredited representatives from other relevant countries. In the UK, that specialist body is the Air Accidents Investigation Branch; in the United States, the NTSB performs a comparable role.

The most important thing to understand is that these are safety investigations. Under the international framework, their fundamental purpose is to establish what happened, identify safety lessons and prevent similar accidents in the future—not to satisfy the news cycle or rush to assign blame.

When an official authority says that an investigation is continuing, that information remains preliminary or that no conclusion has yet been reached, take those qualifications seriously. They are not evasions. They are an honest description of the evidence available at that stage.

Why A Proper Investigation Takes Time

A commercial aviation accident is rarely explained by a single dramatic discovery. Investigators may need to examine the wreckage, recover and analyse flight recorders, study radar and air traffic control information, reconstruct the flight path, review weather conditions and inspect aircraft systems or damaged components.

They may also examine maintenance records, crew training, medical and fatigue considerations, airline procedures, aircraft loading, previous technical reports and the decisions made throughout the flight. Specialists in operations, engineering, human factors, recorded data and other disciplines may all contribute to the investigation. The AAIB’s participation in overseas investigations, for example, can include dedicated expertise in aircraft operations, engineering and recorded data.

Each piece of evidence has to be preserved, verified and considered alongside everything else. Flight recorder information is extremely valuable, but it is not a magical box that immediately prints out the cause. Data must be recovered and interpreted, cockpit recordings must be understood in context and apparent anomalies may need testing or comparison with aircraft systems, maintenance evidence and operational records. ICAO standards call for flight recorders to be read without delay, but reading the data is only part of the much broader investigative process.

The final report then brings together the relevant factual information, the investigators’ analysis, findings, conclusions and any safety recommendations. NTSB reports, for example, distinguish between the factual evidence gathered and the analysis used to determine probable cause, while official safety recommendations are intended to prevent future occurrences.

That level of care is why a credible investigation may take many months and, in especially complex cases, longer. A rapid answer might satisfy public curiosity, but an accurate answer can change aircraft design, training, operating procedures or regulation. The investigation has to be good enough to carry that responsibility.

What This Means For Your Own Flight

When a crash is dominating the news, it is natural to search for an explanation that will tell you whether your own flight is safe. Unfortunately, the earliest and loudest commentary is often the least capable of answering that question.

Instead of asking whether a television guest or social media post sounds convincing, ask what the relevant investigation authority has confirmed. Has a specific hazard been identified? Have regulators issued a safety directive? Have airlines been instructed to inspect, modify or ground a particular aircraft? Or is the cause still unknown while investigators gather evidence?

That distinction matters. If investigators or regulators identify an immediate threat to other aircraft, the aviation system has mechanisms for issuing warnings, requiring inspections, changing procedures or taking aircraft out of service. If no such action has been announced, a wave of online speculation should not be treated as evidence that your flight has suddenly become unsafe.

You do not need to switch off the news or pretend the discussion is not happening. You simply need to keep each claim in the category where it belongs: confirmed fact, informed possibility, unsupported speculation or final investigative finding. Once you do that, the wall of noise becomes much easier to understand, and far less frightening.

Every Accident Helps Make Flying Even Safer

It may sound uncomfortable to describe any benefit emerging from an aviation tragedy, particularly while families are grieving and investigators are still working to understand what happened. Nothing can undo the loss of life, and no safety improvement can make an accident anything other than devastating.

What aviation can do, however, is refuse to waste the lessons it reveals.

Commercial aviation has developed its exceptional safety record partly because serious accidents are not simply treated as isolated tragedies and then forgotten. They are examined in extraordinary detail to identify not only the immediate cause, but also the combination of technical, operational, organisational and human factors that allowed the accident to happen.

That distinction matters because major accidents are rarely as simple as a single component failing or one person making one mistake. They often involve a chain of events in which several safeguards, decisions or circumstances align in an unexpected way. Investigators therefore look beyond the final moments of a flight to understand where that chain could have been interrupted and how the wider system can be strengthened.

Under the international framework established by the International Civil Aviation Organization, the central purpose of an aircraft accident investigation is prevention rather than the assignment of blame. Investigators establish what happened, identify safety deficiencies and make recommendations intended to reduce the likelihood of a similar accident occurring again.

Those recommendations can lead to changes throughout aviation. Aircraft components may be redesigned or modified, maintenance and inspection requirements can be strengthened, operating procedures may be rewritten and pilot training can be updated to reflect risks that were not previously understood well enough. Airlines may change the way crews communicate, respond to warnings or manage particular emergencies, while airports and air traffic services can revise their own systems and procedures.

Regulators also have the power to require action when an unsafe condition is discovered. The US Federal Aviation Administration, for example, issues legally enforceable Airworthiness Directives when it identifies an unsafe condition in an aircraft, engine, propeller or other aviation product that is likely to exist or develop elsewhere. These directives can require inspections, repairs, modifications, operational restrictions or other corrective measures before the affected aircraft can continue flying.

When a danger requires urgent action, regulators do not necessarily wait for a final investigation report. Emergency directives can be issued to address an immediate safety-of-flight concern, while airlines and manufacturers may carry out precautionary inspections or introduce temporary procedures as evidence develops.

This is one of the most reassuring things to understand when a plane crash is dominating the news. The aviation system does not simply assume that an accident was a one-off event and allow every other aircraft to continue operating without question. Investigators, regulators, manufacturers and airlines examine whether the same vulnerability could exist elsewhere and what action is needed to control it.

Safety recommendations remain one of the most important products of a completed investigation. The NTSB describes them as specific actions designed to address safety concerns uncovered during investigations, prevent similar accidents, reduce injuries and save lives.

Not every recommendation is adopted immediately, and aviation safety is not a perfect system in which every lesson is implemented without delay or disagreement. Recommendations may involve technical complexity, international coordination, regulatory processes and difficult decisions about how a risk should be controlled. It would be misleading to suggest that the industry responds flawlessly every time.

The important point is that the machinery for learning and intervention exists, and it operates continuously. Safety improvements do not depend solely on reacting to catastrophic crashes either. Serious incidents, technical failures, operational reports and near misses can also expose weaknesses before they result in a major accident, allowing procedures, equipment or training to be improved without a tragedy having to occur first.

That continual process of reporting, investigation, recommendation and correction is one of the reasons flying has become progressively safer over time. Modern aviation benefits from generations of accumulated evidence, including difficult lessons learned from previous accidents and incidents. Many of the systems, procedures and safeguards passengers now take for granted exist because investigators once identified a vulnerability and the industry acted to prevent it from causing another loss.

None of this diminishes the human cost of an accident, and it should never be framed as though tragedy is somehow necessary or acceptable. The goal of aviation safety is always to identify danger before anyone is harmed. When an accident does happen, however, the response is not merely to mourn it, explain it and move on. The response is to ask what must change so that the same sequence of events is not allowed to happen again.

That is why a major accident appearing across every news channel does not mean the wider aviation system has suddenly stopped being safe. It means one exceptionally rare failure is receiving intense scrutiny from a system built to investigate it, understand it and act on what it reveals.

Don’t Let Fear Make Your Decisions

There is one lesson that travelling has taught me over the years more than any other.

Fear is a terrible decision-maker.

That doesn’t mean fear is irrational or that it should simply be ignored. Fear exists for a reason. It can keep us alert, encourage us to prepare properly and remind us not to take unnecessary risks. The problem comes when fear stops being one factor in our decision-making and becomes the only factor.

That is easier said than done sometimes, I do get that. When you have a flight booked for the next day or two and the mainstream media is dominated by images of a crashed aircraft and rolling headlines about the death toll it is only natural that you are affected by it. There is nothing irrational or embarrassing about that. It is simply part of being human.

That fear is an emotional response, and often a perfectly sensible one. It encourages us to pay attention, to slow down, to question our assumptions and to prepare carefully before we act. The reality of risk, however, is something very different. Risk can be investigated, measured, managed and, in many cases, reduced. When those two things become confused, we begin making decisions based not on what is actually most likely to happen, but on what currently feels most frightening.

I have always travelled on the principle of being prepared, not scared. That doesn’t mean that I am any braver or more reckless than the next person, it simply means that I try to look through the noise, see the risk objectively and make sensible decisions based on that.

Travelling to New York almost immediately after the September 11 attacks was a prime example of that. Like everyone else, I watched those events unfold in disbelief. The images were horrific, the loss of life was unimaginable and, for a while, it genuinely felt as though the world had changed forever. Security was even more intense than usual, nothing felt routine and there was an undeniable feeling that there had been a fundamental shift in the way flying was perceived. I still remember walking onto the aircraft and noticing how many empty seats there were. It was surreal.

Friends had questioned why I was going at all, telling me I was stupid, it was too dangerous, to just cancel the trip. And Looking around the cabin, it was obvious that thousands of travellers had made exactly the same decision.

The thing is the emotional response was entirely understandable. We had all watched the same events unfold. We had all seen the same footage played repeatedly on television, listened to the same discussions about terrorism and aviation security and absorbed the same atmosphere of uncertainty that seemed to surround every journey. It would have been strange not to feel anxious.

But I didn’t see it that way. I looked at the information objectively and chose to fly anyway, because I had learned, through years of travelling, to pause before allowing those feelings to make the decision for me.

I wasn’t trying to prove a point or act tough, I wasn’t pretending I was braver than anyone else, and I certainly wasn’t pretending that the attacks had somehow never happened. Instead, I asked myself the same question I have tried to ask ever since whenever fear threatens to overwhelm common sense. Had the actual level of risk changed to the point where cancelling my trip was the rational decision, or had my perception of that risk changed because I had spent days immersed in one of the most shocking news stories of that year?

Aviation had undoubtedly changed. Security had become tighter, procedures were evolving and governments around the world were responding to an unprecedented attack. None of that altered the fundamental reality that the overwhelming majority of commercial flights would still take off, fly safely to their destination and land without incident. If anything the increased security meant anther attack was even less likely. The headlines had changed dramatically, but the basic mathematics of flying safely had not.

So I boarded the aircraft.

This is just one of many examples that reinforce the mantra that has always guided my decisions on travel and safety. Be prepared, not scared.

Throughout my travels I have repeatedly encountered destinations that other people insisted were simply too dangerous to visit. Sometimes the concern centred on crime, sometimes political instability, terrorism, disease or natural disasters. Occasionally those concerns were justified and required careful planning or a change of itinerary. Much more often, however, the perception of danger had grown far beyond the reality experienced by people actually living and travelling there.

That does not mean the world is perfectly safe, because it plainly is not. Nor does it mean warnings should be ignored or that experienced travellers possess some magical immunity from bad luck. Good travel has never been about dismissing risk. It has always been about understanding it properly. Research your destination. Buy appropriate travel insurance. Take sensible health precautions. Stay aware of your surroundings. Adapt your plans when circumstances genuinely warrant it. Those are the habits that reduce risk in meaningful ways, and they are habits every traveller should develop.

What experience has taught me, however, is that there is an equally important habit to cultivate alongside all of those practical preparations. You must learn to recognise the difference between evidence telling you that your plans genuinely need to change and fear simply urging you to stay where you already feel comfortable. Those two voices can sound remarkably similar, particularly after a major tragedy, but they could not be more different.

That is why I would encourage you, before cancelling a flight because of the latest aviation accident, to stop for a moment and ask yourself whether anything has actually changed that affects your journey. Have investigators identified a wider safety issue? Have regulators required inspections, operational restrictions or the grounding of aircraft? Has new evidence emerged that materially alters the assessment of risk? Or are you responding, perfectly naturally, to days of intense media coverage about an event that remains extraordinarily rare?

Those questions matter because the answers determine whether your decision is being guided by evidence or by emotion.

One of the principles that has always sat at the heart of Bemused Backpacker is that travel should never be reckless, but neither should it be dictated by fear. The purpose of understanding risk is not to eliminate every uncertainty from life—that would be impossible—but to place uncertainty in its proper perspective so that it no longer controls every decision you make. If I had allowed fear alone to decide where I travelled over the past quarter of a century, I would have missed many of the experiences that have shaped both my life and this website.

That is why, despite everything I have seen and everything I know about the genuine risks that exist in the world, I still travel. Not because I believe bad things never happen, and certainly not because I think caution is unnecessary, but because experience has taught me that understanding risk is infinitely more valuable than surrendering to fear. It is a lesson that served me well when I boarded that flight to America all those years ago, and I believe it is every bit as relevant for anyone wondering today whether a recent plane crash should stop them getting on theirs.

So, Should You Be Worried About Your Flight?

If you’ve made it this far, you probably already know what the answer is. No. Not in the way the headlines want you to be.

That doesn’t mean you’re wrong to feel nervous. If a recent plane crash is dominating the news and you have a flight booked tomorrow, next week or even next month, feeling anxious is an entirely normal human reaction. Our brains are wired to pay attention to rare, dramatic events, particularly when they involve something we are about to do ourselves. Add twenty-four-hour news coverage, endless social media speculation and a constant stream of distressing images, and it is hardly surprising that many people begin questioning whether they should still travel.

The important thing is recognising that those feelings are not the same thing as evidence.

By the time you board your aircraft, millions of other passengers will have taken off and landed safely all over the world. Pilots will have completed thousands of routine flights. Engineers will have carried out countless inspections and maintenance checks. Air traffic controllers will have safely guided aircraft through busy skies, and regulators and investigators will still be doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing: examining the recent accident in painstaking detail to establish what happened and whether any wider action is required.

If there is a genuine safety issue affecting other aircraft, the aviation system is designed to respond. Regulators can issue emergency Airworthiness Directives, airlines can inspect or temporarily ground aircraft, manufacturers can provide technical instructions and operating procedures can be changed almost immediately when necessary. You are not expected to identify those risks yourself. That is exactly what the system is there to do.

So if none of those organisations has identified a reason why your flight should not operate, there is very little reason to assume that a dramatic news story has somehow made your own journey uniquely dangerous.

That doesn’t guarantee nothing will ever go wrong. Nothing in life comes with that promise. Every time you get into a car, cross a road or climb a ladder, you accept a level of risk, whether you consciously think about it or not. Flying is no different. The difference is that commercial aviation is one of the most intensively monitored, regulated and continuously improved industries on the planet, and the level of risk is extraordinarily small.

So be prepared.

Check your passport. Buy good travel insurance. Arrive at the airport in plenty of time. Pack sensibly. Follow the crew’s instructions. Then sit back, enjoy the flight and look forward to wherever your journey is taking you.

Don’t let fear rob you of experiences you’ll remember for the rest of your life simply because the news has spent a week reminding you that, on very rare occasions, terrible things can happen.

I’ve built my entire approach to travel around one simple principle: be prepared, not scared. It has served me well through terrorist attacks, disease outbreaks, political unrest, natural disasters and countless headlines telling me I should stay at home. More often than not, the reality on the ground has proved far less frightening than the picture painted by the rolling news cycle.

Aviation deserves exactly the same perspective. Respect the risks, understand them properly, make sensible decisions based on evidence rather than emotion, and don’t allow an exceptionally rare tragedy to convince you that one of the safest forms of transport ever created has suddenly become unsafe overnight.

And if, after all of that, you’re still feeling a little nervous? Well, remember what Superman says.

‘Statistically speaking, it’s still the safest way to travel.‘

And frankly, if Superman says flying is safe… who am I to argue?