A long New York Times Magazine piece asking "Is Air Travel Getting Less Safe?" has run into trouble with the very agency it leaned on. The National Transportation Safety Board publicly accused the article of distorting its comments to attack the Trump administration, mischaracterising its role in the 1,500-hour pilot rule, and wrongly implying negligence by the Black Hawk helicopter pilots in the Washington National Airport collision. In a post on X, the agency said it was "disappointed that this article sensationalizes and politicizes tragedies." The piece, written by James Fallows — better known as a political journalist and Jimmy Carter's former speechwriter than as an aviation reporter — frames air traffic controller overwork, military aircraft mixing with passenger flights, and unresolved safety recommendations as consequences of the current administration. Critics point out these problems long predate it: a 2023 Times investigation documented roughly 300 near-collisions a year, staffing shortages and outdated equipment well before the 2024 election.
The factual issues go deeper than framing. The article's account of the 2009 Colgan Air crash near Buffalo blames icing that made the plane a "frigid brick," but the FAA's analysis found icing wasn't a cause — the captain pulled back into a stall after failing to monitor airspeed. Both pilots already exceeded 1,500 hours. The article also calls Colgan the last fatal US airline crash before American 5342, skipping the 2019 PenAir runway overrun at Unalaska that killed a passenger. And the celebrated 1,500-hour rule only took effect in 2013, so the first four-plus years of the post-Colgan safety streak happened without it. Europe's co-pilots face no such minimum and safety records are comparable.
On the data itself, the article's own runway incursion figures don't show a steady decline under one administration or a crisis under another: 22 serious incursions in 2023, seven in 2024, fourteen in 2025, nine through October 2026. The 132 FAA employees fired in the DOGE purge were reinstated by March 2025 — a reversal the piece leaves out.
Why should flyers care? Because the real story is a genuinely underfunded, badly managed air traffic system — one where separating the control operator from the regulator, as Canada has done, is a live reform idea — and noisy partisan coverage makes it harder to have the honest argument about staffing, technology and route design that actual safety depends on. The NTSB's objection also cuts both ways: its own findings assign responsibility to the Black Hawk crew for failing to maintain visual separation, alongside FAA route-design failures.
For travellers, the reassuring baseline holds: US flying remains statistically far safer than driving, and recent incident numbers are small. The useful takeaway is to follow NTSB findings and FAA actions rather than trend pieces that bend them to fit a political thesis.
