Feeling anxious before that flight? You’re not alone on Long Island

A series of high-profile aviation crashes before the start of seasonal travel — including a Delta Air Lines jet that flipped Monday at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, causing minor injuries but no fatalities — has set Long Islanders like Patricia Ferrer on edge.

Ferrer, of Central Islip,  said she spent part of a Tuesday flight to Long Island MacArthur Airport from Florida — where she’d attended her niece’s baby shower — in prayer.

The latest aircraft crash in Toronto, the fourth major aviation accident in North America in three weeks, only added to the Long Island resident’s worries.

Authorities said Tuesday afternoon that all but two of the 21 people on the Delta flight from Minneapolis to Toronto who had been transported to hospitals for injuries had been discharged.

“When I saw that, I was like, Oh, I don’t even know if I want to go home,” Ferrer said of the latest crash. “It’s nerve wracking.” Several bouts of turbulence on her flight to Long Island made it worse.

“Your mind starts going,” she added. “You don’t know.”

Fatal crashes of commercial planes in the United States remain rare, and experts say commercial air travel remains by far the safest mode of transportation in the country.

Even with close to a billion passengers flying a year, the last major fatal crash before 67 people died Jan. 29 when American Airlines Flight 5342 collided mid-air with an Army helicopter while coming in for a landing at a Washington, D.C., area airport was in 2009 near Buffalo.

A 2024 article in the Journal of Air Transport Management from professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology  calculated the death risk per person boarding at one in 13.7 million, with the odds of death for any single person so low the National Safety Council put them at “too small to calculate.”

But a discussion of those odds is something a nervous traveler might counter by also pointing to the recent deadly crashes of a medical transportation plane in Philadelphia and a small commuter plane in Alaska.

“For the travelling public, we need to separate anxiety and risk. They are not the same thing,” said Kristy Kiernan, associate director of the Boeing Center for Aviation and Aerospace Safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “The risk is still extremely low, but that is not enough to make the anxiety low.”
With AP

Check back for updates on this developing story.