WHY DO SMALL PLANES CRASH SO MUCH MORE OFTEN?

There are very few airliner accidents in the United States. When a large plane goes down with hundreds of people on board, it makes all of the headlines, but the reality is that this is rather uncommon.
​
Still, there are plenty of plane crashes every year. They just involve small planes far more often. So, why do these small planes tend to crash?

There are a lot of reasons, and it often takes quite a bit of work to determine exactly what happened. If the people on the plane were killed in the crash, investigators tend to lack a lot of critical information and have to piece things together after the fact.

One reason for the crashes is the inexperience of pilots. Commercial pilots need to put in far more hours to be allowed to fly, and they also do it for a living. Many fly multiple times per week. That's much different than the private pilot who takes a plane up a few times a year. Experience helps prevent accidents.

Specific mistakes that are made include:

• Running out of fuel
• Losing control of the plane while it's still flying.
• Flying directly into the ground in a controlled manner—which often indicates that the pilot simply did not see something on the ground, like a hill, and ran into it.
• Bad landings; these are also sometimes caused by things on the ground, like trees near a runway that a pilot doesn't see.
• Bird strikes.

​
If you have been injured in a plane crash on a plane of any size, be sure you know your rights to compensation in Arizona.
​
Source: Washington Post, "The many reasons small planes crash," Gail Sullivan, accessed April 01, 2016