Data From the Federal Aviation Administration Sparks New Safety Concerns About Flying Commercial

Shocking data from the Federal Aviation Administration is prompting stomach-churning fears over whether commercial aviation is far riskier than the public has been led to believe.

For decades, Americans have been assured flying commercial is the safest form of travel — but just days after a fatal collision between an Air Canada Express flight and a fire truck at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport, the National Enquirer has obtained an FAA report suggesting danger lurks at hundreds of airports across the country.

The worrying report flags nearly 600 runway “hot spots” where an “increased risk” of problems exist during landing, takeoff and taxiing.

These “hot spots” are not confined to remote airports, but bedevil pilots at some of America’s busiest hubs, including L.A.’s LAX, New York’s JFK, Newark’s Liberty International Airport (EWR) and Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson.

At San Francisco International Airport, four “hot spots” create a veritable minefield on taxiways B, C and T — danger zones where pilots are said to routinely miss turns or places where they have less than ideal room to maneuver.

Alarmingly, the “hot spot” report doesn’t come close to summing up the dangers pilots and passengers face, sources say. The March 22 crash at LaGuardia, for instance, occurred at the intersection of runway 4 and taxiway Delta, which isn’t noted on the FAA “hot spot” report.

That crash killed two pilots, hurled a flight attendant from the plane and injured several passengers.

And a landmark report in the June 9, 2025, issue of the Enquirer highlighted other dangers presented by air traffic controller shortages and the aging and — in some cases obsolete — infrastructure underpinning the system used to prevent planes from crashing into each other!

Last year, for example, a Colorado air traffic control facility that coordinates flights over 100,000-plus square miles of the U.S. suffered an outage that silenced communications for over six minutes!

That May 12 outage followed two others on April 28 and May 9 at a Philadelphia facility responsible for guiding planes into and out of Newark’s EWR that left controllers without radar or communications for a nerve-wracking 60 seconds.

What’s more, a chilling study recently found that 99 percent of the 313 air traffic control facilities in the U.S. are chronically understaffed.

Statistics show commercial aviation is still the safest way to travel, with 34 fatal accidents logged during the entire 1990s with 858 deaths. By comparison, 46,000 Americans perish annually in car accidents while another 800 or so die in recreational boating incidents.

But Vance Hilderman, the founder and CEO of AFuzion, one of the world’s largest aviation safety certification companies, tells the Enquirer the trend is heading in the wrong direction.

“Roughly a decade ago, commercial aviation was about 10 to 12 times as safe as the next safest mode of transportation, or trains,” says the 45-year industry vet. “But that factor has now fallen to about five or six times as safe, given a variety of reasons.”

Reasons for the trend include shortages of air traffic controllers, America’s aging air traffic controller infrastructure, record levels of planes clogging the skies, and diminishing pilot skill, according to Hilderman.

“Unfortunately, there are precious few Chesley Sullenbergers flying today,” he says, referring to the US Airways pilot who safely landed an Airbus A320 on the Hudson River in 2009 after a bird strike.

“It’s more often the case now that a pilot did not serve in the military — as ‘Sully,’ or most pilots, once did — and they don’t have the same level of skill if an emergency occurs.”

He adds: “To put it succinctly, pilots have become too reliant on computers, and deadly crashes are happening as a result.”