Among them are a devastating mid-air collision involving an American Airlines passenger plane and US army helicopter in January, resulting in a total loss of life.

There was also the February plane crash over Philadelphia where an air ambulance plummeted to the ground and exploded in a fireball on a city street just seconds after taking off.

A plane flying over the Alaskan coast went down with no survivors after contact was lost following take-off.

Earlier this month, at least 12 people were killed when their plane crashed into the sea shortly after taking off from Honduras, including famous musician Aurelio Martinez Suazo, though a number of people had been recovered alive.

There have already been several vividly tragic disasters this year (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Speaking to the Daily Mail, aviation experts had different responses as to the high number of plane crashes.

We’re not yet a quarter of the way through 2025, yet the death toll from aviation disasters is already around a third what it was last year.

Aviation safety professional John Cox told the Mail that despite ‘a spike in the number of high profile accidents’ the spate of plane crashes were ‘not related’ and there was ‘not a degradation in aviation safety’.

MIT statistics professor Arnold Barnett said it was unlikely that something ‘suddenly disappeared in late December 2024’, and said that the various crashes were all under very different conditions and thus ‘offer no evidence of a systematic problem’.

These are accidents, that they happen close together does not necessarily indicate a pattern or signal that something has changed.

It is not as though plane crashes are a uniquely 2025 phenomenon either, the tragic disasters can strike at any time without warning and when they do the death toll is often catastrophic.

There have been some disasters which people have thankfully managed to survive (GEOFF ROBINS/AFP via Getty Images)

The experts stressed that air travel was still the safest way to get around, statistically speaking, even if there seem to be many aviation disasters that could mean little more than terrible misfortune.

Not every expert agrees entirely, however.

Earlier this month former pilot and crash investigator Shawn Pruchnicki agreed that air travel was still the safest way to get around, but claimed people working in the aviation industry saw the problems coming.

He claimed that he’d seen ‘the safety buffer that took decades to build steadily eroded in recent years’, suggesting that ‘experts have been raising the alarm for years’.

The former pilot said he hadn’t been surprised by the horrific crash involving an American Airlines plane and US army helicopter, claiming he ‘long feared that it wasn’t a matter of if such a catastrophe would happen but where and when’.

He suggested there was a ‘chronic shortage of air traffic controllers’ which meant those doing the crucial job were ‘overworked and overstressed’.