Air India crash makes 2025 deadliest for air travel in years

The crash of Air India Flight 171 has turned 2025 into one of the deadliest years in the past decade for civil aviation.  There were 242 people aboard the Boeing Co. 787 jetliner, according to the airline, when the plane went down in a fireball Thursday shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad, India. The accident is likely to produce more fatalities given it crashed into a residential area. 

Globally, the number of civil aviation fatalities has reached more than 460 in 2025, according to Jan-Arwed Richter, founder of Jacdec, a German consulting firm that tracks aviation safety. The average over the past decade is 284 based on the firm’s methodology.

“This year still has more than six months to go, so this could be concerning if this rate of fatal accidents would go on,” Richter said. 

Commercial-aviation safety reached a high-water mark in 2023, when industry groups said there were no fatal crashes. Since then, a number of high-profile incidents have grabbed headlines.

In January, American Airlines Group Inc. Flight 5342 collided with an Army helicopter near Washington, in one of the deadliest US civil aviation disasters in decades. Less than a month later, a Delta Air Lines Inc. jet flipped over while landing in Toronto.

While no one died in the second mishap, they raised new questions with the flying public about whether air travel was safe.  

Thursday’s Air India crash is on track to become the worst commercial airline disaster since MH17 in 2014. The Malaysian Airlines flight, shot down over Ukraine, left 298 people dead, according to Aviation Safety Network, which tracks fatal crashes. 

The deadliest years for civil aviation in the past decade were in 2018 and 2015, with more than 500 fatalities each, based on Jacdec’s figures. The group tracks aircraft with at least 19 seats, or weighing 5.7 tons.

Richter cautioned that most of the recent accidents are still under investigation, the numbers are within norms and that airplane crashes “happen mostly totally at random without a comparability to each other.” 

He urged media not to jump to conclusions while investigators search for the cause of the Air India crash. 

“And I want to emphasize the bigger picture here,” Richter said. “Air travel is and remains the safest way of going from one place to another.”