The FAA's most recent published figure puts the US general aviation fatal accident rate at an estimated 0.68 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours for fiscal year 2024, which works out at roughly one fatal accident for every 147,000 hours flown. That is the honest headline number, and the honest follow-up is that it covers an enormously varied activity in which some kinds of flying are considerably riskier than others, and the differences are driven by decisions rather than by machinery.
This page sets out what the published data actually says, where it comes from, and what it means for someone deciding whether to get into a small aircraft. It is the detailed companion to our reference page on fear of flying and how pilots would fix it. If your question is specifically about flight training rather than about small aircraft in general, is learning to fly dangerous answers that one directly.
The Numbers, With Their Source
The two authoritative US sources are the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates civil aviation accidents and publishes the underlying data, and the Federal Aviation Administration, which publishes rate statistics against estimated flight hours. The table below is from the FAA's General Aviation Safety Fact Sheet.
| Fiscal year | Fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours |
|---|---|
| FY2017 | 0.83 |
| FY2018 | 0.89 |
| FY2019 | 0.95 |
| FY2020 | 0.91 |
| FY2021 | 0.75 |
| FY2022 | 0.90 |
| FY2023 | 0.71 |
| FY2024 (estimate) | 0.68 |
Two things are worth pulling out of that table. The first is the absolute level: a rate below one per 100,000 hours means that in a full calendar year of flying eight hours every single day, you would accumulate under 3,000 hours, which is a small fraction of the interval between fatal accidents in the fleet as a whole. The FAA's figures for FY2024 estimate 195 fatal accidents and 337 fatalities across the entirety of US general aviation for the year.
The second is the trend. The rate has moved from 0.95 in FY2019 to an estimated 0.68 in FY2024. The FAA states that it and industry met a goal of reducing the general aviation fatal accident rate by 10 percent between 2009 and 2018, and are working to reduce it by a further one percent per year. This is an activity that is getting measurably safer, largely through better avionics, better training emphasis and better weather information rather than through anything dramatic.
One caution about reading any of these figures. Accident counts are small in absolute terms, which means a single bad year in one category can move a rate visibly without telling you anything about the underlying trend. Judge the direction over five or ten years rather than reacting to one line in the table, and be skeptical of any article that quotes a single year to make a point.
Why The Headline Rate Understates How Safe Training Is
"General aviation" is a regulatory category, not a description of an activity. It includes everything in US civil aviation that is not a scheduled airline operation or military flying. That means the same number covers:
- flight training in modern aircraft with an instructor on board, in good weather, near an airport;
- agricultural flying at fifteen feet above a field with obstacles, which is a demanding job by any measure;
- personal cross-country flying in single-engine aircraft at night, in weather, over mountains;
- banner towing, pipeline patrol, aerial survey and firefighting support;
- experimental and amateur-built aircraft, including first flights of newly built airframes;
- aerobatics, glider towing, bush flying and backcountry operations.
Averaging all of that produces one number that describes none of it. It is the equivalent of quoting a single road fatality rate covering motorcycle racing, commercial trucking and a retired couple driving to church, and then applying it to your own commute.
What Actually Causes The Accidents
This is the part that matters most, and it is where the data stops being reassuring in the abstract and starts being genuinely useful. The FAA ranks the leading causes of fatal general aviation accidents over 2014 to 2023 in this order.
- Loss of control in flight. By a substantial margin the largest category. In practice this usually means an aerodynamic stall at low altitude, most often in the traffic pattern during a turn onto final approach, where there is no height available to recover. The aircraft was working. The pilot flew it beyond the edge of its envelope in a place with no margin.
- Power system component failure. Engine or propulsion failures. Some of these are genuine mechanical events, and a significant proportion trace to fuel management, maintenance deferral or operating an engine outside its limits. Note that an engine failure by itself is survivable in a light aircraft; what turns it into an accident is usually what happens in the thirty seconds afterwards.
- Unknown or undetermined. Accidents where the evidence did not support a finding. Honest data includes this category, and any source that does not is presenting you with something tidier than reality.
- Controlled flight into terrain. A serviceable aircraft flown into the ground, a hillside or an obstacle. Almost always a navigation, visibility or situational awareness failure, frequently at night or in reduced visibility.
- Accidental flight into bad weather. A visual-rules pilot continuing into cloud or deteriorating conditions they are not qualified or equipped for. This is one of the oldest and most lethal patterns in aviation, and it is a decision, taken on the ground and then not reversed.
Look at that list as a whole. Four of the five named causes are about pilot decisions and handling rather than about the aircraft failing. Turbulence does not appear on it. Structural failure does not appear on it. Mid-air collision does not appear on it. The things most people are afraid of are simply not what appears in the data, which is the single most useful fact on this page.
Training Flying Versus Personal Flying
The distinction the raw category hides is between flying with an instructor and flying alone for your own purposes, and it matters because the causes above map onto them very differently.
Dual instructional flight has structural advantages. There are two people, one of whom is a qualified professional whose entire job is to watch what you are doing and intervene before it becomes a problem. The flying happens close to an airport, in good weather, at times of day chosen for the conditions, within a syllabus. The aircraft is maintained on a commercial schedule rather than by an owner deciding what can wait. The instructor has no personal reason to press on to a destination, which removes the pressure that sits behind a substantial share of weather-related accidents.
Personal flying, by contrast, is where the trip-completion pressure lives. Somebody has to be at a meeting, or has passengers waiting, or has a hotel booked, and the weather is marginal. That is the situation in which the fourth and fifth causes on the FAA's list occur. It is also where currency erodes: a private pilot who flies six hours a year is a very different proposition from one who flies sixty, and the regulations set only a floor, requiring a flight review every 24 calendar months under 14 CFR 61.56 and three takeoffs and landings within the preceding 90 days to carry passengers under 14 CFR 61.57.
The AOPA Air Safety Institute publishes an annual breakdown of non-commercial fixed-wing accidents by type of flying, and its editions have consistently shown instructional flying accounting for a smaller share of fatal accidents than personal flying. We are pointing you at the current edition rather than quoting a figure, because the numbers are revised and we would rather you read the source than trust our transcription of it. The direction of the finding, however, has been stable for many years.
What Small Aircraft Have That People Do Not Realize
Some of the fear attached to light aircraft comes from an assumption that they are simpler and therefore flimsier than airliners. In the ways that matter they are less redundant, and in several ways they are better protected than people expect.
Every certificated light aircraft engine carries two completely independent ignition systems, each with its own magneto and its own set of spark plugs, and both are tested individually on the ground before every single flight. Most training aircraft carry fuel in more than one tank with independent feeds. Airframe structures are certificated to load factors far beyond anything encountered in normal flight; a normal-category light aircraft is designed for substantially higher positive g than a transport category jet, precisely because it is lighter and more responsive to gusts.
Some aircraft go further. Our Cirrus SR22 carries the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System, a whole-aircraft parachute that can be deployed to bring the entire airplane down under canopy, and it has been used in service to save lives in situations that would once have had no remaining option. We explain how it works on the CAPS parachute page.
None of that makes a light aircraft an airliner. It does mean that the mental image of a fragile machine held together by optimism is wrong, and that the reason the accident causes look the way they do is not that the equipment is marginal.
Comparing With Cars And Airliners, Carefully
You will see confident claims in both directions about how small aircraft compare to driving. Most of them are built on a units problem, and it is worth understanding so you can judge the claim yourself.
Aviation rates are quoted per flight hour. Road safety is usually quoted per hundred million vehicle miles. Converting between them requires assuming a speed, and the assumption does most of the work in the answer: a light aircraft covers roughly two to three times the distance a car does in an hour, so a per-mile comparison flatters aviation and a per-hour comparison flatters driving. Anyone who gives you a single clean multiple without telling you which basis they used is not being careful.
Two honest statements survive that problem. First, scheduled US airline flying is safer than both by a very wide margin on any basis, which is why the fear of airline flying that brings most people to this site is so out of proportion to the risk; the NTSB and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics publish those tables and they are worth looking at directly. Second, general aviation as a whole carries more risk per hour than driving does, and the gap is concentrated in the categories of general aviation that are least like a training flight with an instructor on a clear morning at Van Nuys.
The useful conclusion is not a number. It is that in general aviation, unlike in most transport, the risk is dominated by decisions you or your instructor make, which means it is a risk you can act on rather than one you simply accept.
What A Flight School Actually Controls
Given that the causes are mostly decisions, the question becomes which of those decisions a school makes for you. These are the levers a well-run school has, and they line up almost exactly with the FAA's list.
| Cause | What a school controls |
|---|---|
| Loss of control in flight | Stall and slow-flight training to proficiency, repeated; pattern discipline; an instructor on board who intervenes early; simulator work where the maneuver can be repeated safely |
| Power system component failure | Maintenance on a commercial schedule rather than on an owner's budget; engine run-up and dual ignition checks before every flight; engine-failure procedures trained until they are automatic |
| Controlled flight into terrain | Local area knowledge, terrain briefings, altitude discipline, and not sending low-time students into terrain or at night before they are ready |
| Accidental flight into bad weather | Student weather minimums stricter than the legal minimums, a cancellation policy with no financial penalty, and an instructor with nowhere they need to be |
| Currency and skill decay | Stage checks with a second instructor, a written syllabus, and scheduling that keeps lessons close enough together to hold skill |
Our own standards, including inspection intervals, weather policy and how stage checks work, are set out on safety at You Fly LA.
Questions Worth Asking Any Flight School
- What are your student weather minimums, and are they stricter than the legal minimums?
- What happens financially if you cancel a lesson for weather?
- How often are the aircraft inspected, and who does the maintenance?
- Do you use stage checks with a second instructor, and at what points?
- How do you train stalls and slow flight, given that loss of control is the leading fatal cause?
- What is the policy if an instructor and a student disagree about whether to fly?
A school that answers those readily and specifically is telling you something. A school that treats them as an odd thing to ask is telling you something too. Our page on questions to ask a flight school has the longer list.
Related Reading
- Fear of flying: what it is and how pilots would fix it — the reference page for the whole subject.
- Is learning to fly dangerous — the same question narrowed to flight training.
- Safety at You Fly LA — maintenance intervals, weather minimums and training standards.
- How to overcome fear of flying — what to do with all of this if the numbers alone have not helped.
- What to expect on your first flight — the sequence from arrival to debrief.
Are Small Planes Safe FAQ
What Is The General Aviation Accident Rate?
The FAA's General Aviation Safety Fact Sheet gives an estimated 0.68 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours for fiscal year 2024, down from 0.95 in FY2019. That covers the whole of US general aviation, including categories of flying considerably riskier than flight training.
What Is The Most Common Cause Of Small Plane Crashes?
Loss of control in flight, by a clear margin, according to the FAA's ranking for 2014 to 2023. In practice that usually means an aerodynamic stall at low altitude with insufficient height to recover. It is a handling and decision failure rather than a mechanical one.
Are Small Planes More Dangerous Than Cars?
General aviation as a whole carries more risk per hour than driving does, but the comparison is sensitive to whether you measure per hour or per mile, and a light aircraft covers far more ground per hour than a car. The more useful point is that the risk in general aviation is concentrated in specific kinds of flying and specific decisions.
Is Flying With An Instructor Safer Than Flying Alone?
Structurally, yes. There are two people, one of them a professional whose job is to intervene early; the flying happens near an airport in chosen conditions; the aircraft is maintained on a commercial schedule; and nobody has anywhere they need to be, which removes the pressure behind a large share of weather-related accidents.
What Happens If The Engine Stops In A Small Plane?
The aircraft becomes a glider, not a falling object. It descends at a shallow angle at a known speed, and choosing a landing site and flying to it is one of the first emergency procedures any student learns and then practices repeatedly before flying alone. Engine failure by itself is survivable; what matters is what the pilot does next.
Do Small Planes Get Inspected Properly?
Aircraft used for flight instruction for hire must have an annual or 100-hour inspection within the preceding 100 hours of time in service under 14 CFR 91.409(b), plus an annual inspection within the preceding 12 calendar months under 14 CFR 91.409(a). That is a considerably more rigorous schedule than a private car receives.
Where Can I Check These Numbers Myself?
The NTSB publishes aviation accident data and statistical reviews, the FAA publishes the General Aviation Safety Fact Sheet, and the AOPA Air Safety Institute publishes an annual breakdown of non-commercial fixed-wing accidents by type of flying. All three are public and none of them require you to take anybody's word for it.
Is Van Nuys A Safe Airport To Learn At?
It is a Class D towered field with two parallel runways under the Los Angeles Class B shelf, which means positive air traffic control, clear procedures and a high volume of professional traffic. Busy and controlled is generally easier to manage than quiet and uncontrolled, and it produces pilots who are comfortable on the radio.
Come And See It For Yourself
Numbers change minds slowly. An hour in an aircraft with an instructor who will answer every question you have changes them faster. A 60-minute discovery flight is $229 and you fly it from the left seat, or book a free consultation and ask us anything on this page in person. Call (818) 330-1318 any day between 9 AM and 9 PM. We are at 7900 Balboa Blvd, Van Nuys, CA 91406.