Are You Feeling A Little Nervous About Flying? You Have Lots of Company

Flights are canceled or delayed after a Delta Airlines plane crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport on February 17, 2025. Katherine KY Cheng/Getty Images

Earlier this year, the collision of a commercial flight and a helicopter over Washington, D.C. left 67 people dead. Not long after that, a Delta flight landing in Toronto ended up flipping over on the tarmac, making for a particularly unsettling scene for anyone watching footage at home. With those high-profile catastrophes taking place against the backdrop of the FAA firing hundreds of workers, you might wonder if people are feeling a bit more apprehensive about air travel these days. Spoiler alert: they sure are.

Travel site The Points Guy decided to look into how Americans are feeling about air travel right now with the help of The Harris Poll. The results of their new survey are very telling. Recent disasters have indeed left travelers feeling more nervous: of those polled, 65% said that recent events had made them more concerned about flying. That said, 72% of those polled agreed with the idea that air travel is currently safe.

Those two are not mutually exclusive; it’s very possible to understand that, statistically, flying remains incredibly safe even as the prospect of being on a specific flight can be far more unsettling. And for over a third of the survey respondents — 36%, to be specific — concern over air travel has prompted them to change their travel plans.

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This survey isn’t the only in-depth analysis of beliefs and reality around flying in 2025. In an article at Slate published earlier this month, Jeff Wise had good news and bad news for nervous travelers. Wise wrote that the current situation “stems from a combination of bad luck and institutional failings that have been accumulating for years.” That’s the good news; the bad news, Wise observed that the Trump administration is “aggressively pursuing policies that will make travelers’ odds inevitably worse.”

Between that analysis and The Atlantic‘s Isaac Stanley-Becker reporting that “[i]nside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low,” it isn’t hard to see why flying right now could be a little more unsettling than usual. Hopefully for us all, those pre-flight jitters will turn out to be unfounded.