On January 29, 2025, a midair collision between a passenger jet and a military helicopter over Washington, D.C., stunned a city that trusted in tightly controlled skies. The crash, which killed 67 people and grounded flights across the region, reopened debates about airspace safety. As with every aviation tragedy, two key questions emerged: What went wrong? And what can we learn?
From the Wright brothers’ first flight, in 1903, to the rise of commercial aviation in the 1920s and 1930s, the sky became a laboratory. Pilots were the test subjects. Engineering was often informed guesswork. As the Wrights once described their strategy with glider experiments: “Escape accident long enough to acquire skill sufficient to prevent accident.”
The dream of flight stretches back to the ancients. From the myth of Daedalus and Icarus to the Renaissance inventors who strapped wings to their bodies and leapt from towers, it rarely ended well. As the 17th-century aerial scholar John Wilkins admitted, “Most of these artists did unfortunately miscarry by falling down and breaking their arms or legs.” But he also noted that such difficult experiments produced better results with trial and repetition.
Early airplanes were fragile, built from fabric, wood, and wire, with capricious engines that sputtered and needed frequent overhauls. Their unreliability was part of the thrill. Crashes were expected—indeed necessary, if the field were to advance. In 1910, the aviator John Neale said, “Every day’s work ends in a smash, because, with an experimental machine, one simply goes on till a smash of some sort puts an end to the experiments for the day.” In other words, flying simply continued until it couldn’t.
In Britain, Manchester-born Jack Alcock was exposed to the perils of flight at a young age. In 1911, still in his teens, he witnessed one of the country’s first fatal crashes: a biplane spiraled into the ground before his eyes. He helped pull the pilot’s body from the wreckage, a traumatic moment that would stay with him for life. During World War I, flying heavy bomber aircraft in the Royal Air Force deepened Alcock’s resolve to confront aviation’s dangers head-on.
In 1919, Alcock and his navigator, Ted Brown, achieved a great milestone: the first nonstop transatlantic flight, a journey I trace in my book The Big Hop: The First Nonstop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Future. Their aircraft, a modified Vickers Vimy bomber, had no working radio and no radar. Brown relied on sextant readings—and dead reckoning—for navigation. Ice jammed the ailerons, instruments failed, and they nearly crashed into the sea. Yet they made it from Newfoundland to Ireland, completing the journey attempted by many others who vanished or crashed along the way.
These failures mattered. Every crash provided clues. Tragedy and errors spurred new navigational technologies, better pilot training, and improvements to aircraft design and weather forecasting.
By the early 1920s, civil aviation was booming. Barnstormers such as Charles Lindbergh performed stunts for entertainment; airmail pilots, many of them ex-military, flew in all weather, guided by little more than railway lines and speculation. Crashes were still frequent, but they continued to drive change. In 1926, the U.S. passed the Air Commerce Act—its first major step in regulating commercial flight. Inspectors were hired, pilot licenses were required, and accident investigations became mandatory.
Some of aviation’s most crucial safety innovations came from mundane failures discovered during these investigations. Forgotten pins, jammed rudders, and misjudged landings led to—among other advances—checklists, cockpit standardization, and, eventually, flight-data recorders.
With the 1950s’ jet age came new risks. The de Havilland Comet, the world’s first commercial jet airliner, promised a leap forward when it made its debut, in 1952. After three Comets suffered fatal midair breakups, the British government’s engineers launched one of the most thorough investigations in aviation history. At the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, Hampshire, inspectors traced the cause to metal fatigue near square windows and apertures, exacerbated by repeated pressurization cycles. Though the lesson came at a high cost to de Havilland—Britain’s early lead in jet aviation was lost to U.S. companies like Boeing—it reshaped aircraft design worldwide.
Today, when an aircraft crashes, the ripple effects span the industry. Tools are more advanced, and the stakes for high-capacity airliners are higher, but the process would be familiar to the aviators of a century ago: investigate, understand, and improve. The recent Washington collision is a sobering reminder: Aviation safety is not guaranteed. It is pursued. Every smooth landing today is a quiet tribute to the failures that came before—and the knowledge those failures gave us.
David Rooney is a British writer and museum curator
