Hundreds of aircraft, including both small private planes and larger commercial airliners, have gone missing throughout aviation history, with the Aviation Safety Network tracking around 100 major disappearances since 1948 alone, though exact figures vary and many are small general aviation aircraft, with major airliner disappearances being rarer but highly publicized, like MH370. While most smaller planes vanish in remote areas, large passenger jet disappearances are few but devastating, highlighting ongoing challenges in tracking aircraft in vast, remote locations, especially with older technology.
Aero OY passenger flight from Tallinn to Helsinki carrying two Finnish Army officers, a pilot, and a flight mechanic. Extreme fog present at time of disappearance. Finnish Air Force and Navy and Estonian Navy searches found no trace of the aircraft.
How many planes have gone missing in history? Yet such disappearances are not that uncommon: according to records assembled by the Aviation Safety Network, 100 aircraft have gone missing in flight and never been recovered since 1948 including flight 19.
According to the Aviation Safety Network, there were over 5,000 documented plane accidents in 2024. These incidents resulted in 1,571 fatalities. Most of the accidents involved personally owned aircraft, private aviation companies, or military aircraft. Commercial airlines were involved in very few incidents.
The search cost about $183 million Cdn and was called off after two years in January 2017, with no traces of the plane found. So far, some 30 pieces of suspected aircraft debris have been collected, but only three wing fragments have been confirmed to be from MH370.
The plane that landed 35 years after departure, with 92 skeletons inside The story of this plane may leave everyone petrified. This is the plane with Santiago Airlines Flight 513 that landed 35 years later in Puerto Alegre, Brazil, and left a tetric scene that cannot be forgotten for those who witnessed it.
Signals thought to be from the plane's black box turned out to be from other sources, and no wreckage was found. The first confirmed debris was a flaperon discovered on Réunion Island in July 2015, with additional fragments later found along the east coast of Africa. The search was suspended in January 2017.
In fact, the average risk of an American being in a plane crash is about 1 in 11 million. You're about three times more likely to be killed by a shark and about 2,000 times more likely to get in a motor vehicle crash.
Ghost flight (commercial aviation), an empty or near-empty flight carried out to preserve a landing slot.
National Transportation Safety Board analyzed all the airplane accidents between 1983 and 2000. Of the 53,487 people involved, 51,207 survived. That's a survival rate of 95.7 percent.
The deliberate crashes of the aforementioned American Airlines Flight 11, as well as United Airlines Flight 175 at the World Trade Center, and the subsequent collapse of both towers on 11 September 2001 caused 2,606 ground fatalities in addition to the deaths of the 157 people on board both flights, making it the ...
On November 4, 2025, UPS Airlines Flight 2976, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11F cargo aircraft flying from Louisville, Kentucky, to Honolulu, Hawaii, crashed shortly after takeoff, resulting in 14 fatalities and 15 injuries.
MH370: What we know about Malaysia Airlines plane, 11 years on. Dec 3 (Reuters) - The disappearance nearly 12 years ago of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 with 239 people on board remains one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries. The Boeing 777 went missing on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.
The biggest mystery of MH370 is its unexplained disappearance and the lack of conclusive evidence as to why it vanished, with the main wreckage and flight recorders never found, despite its transponder and communication systems going silent, leading to theories ranging from pilot suicide/hijacking to catastrophic mechanical failure or a complex cyber-terror attack, none proven, leaving the fate of the 239 people onboard and the plane itself unresolved.
Although a few World War II planes have been found in the area, none has ever been positively identified as being from Flight 19, or as the rescue plane. As the years went by, and the legends piled up, Flight 19 became known as “The Lost Patrol.”
She argues that landings are riskier than takeoffs due to fewer escape options. “It's a really critical moment, especially for midair collisions and other incidents,” Schiavo emphasized. “When you're taking off, you have the runway in front of you.
At just 17 years old, Juliane Koepcke survived the impossible. On Christmas Eve 1971, her plane, LANSA Flight 508, was struck by lightning over the Amazon rainforest, breaking apart mid-air. Strapped to her seat, Juliane plummeted over 10,000 feet to the ground and 1/2.
– Data suggests that sitting in the middle of a row is the safest place to be. Is the seat located at the front or the back of the aircraft? – A seat in economy would be the safest place in the extremely rare event of a crash since the rear of the plane is less likely to be the first impact.
The true fate of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to Beijing, which left radar coverage less than two hours after take-off from Kuala Lumpur, is unknown. No main wreckage has ever been found and neither have the bodies of the 239 passengers on the flight, despite the most expensive search in the history of aviation.
Yup. As detailed in the documentary by numerous family members, when loved ones tried to call the people on board MH370 after the plane vanished, they eerily heard a dial tone over and over again. But nobody ever picked up. And speculation has mounted on social media this means the plane never crashed after all.
It's been 10 years! Today in 2014 (exactly 10 years ago), Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 lost communications and disappeared from radar less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur enroute Beijing, China. The last words heard from the aircraft were "Goodnight Malaysian three seven zero".
A Chinese court has ordered Malaysia Airlines to pay 2.9m yuan (around £300,000) to each of the families of eight MH370 flight passengers. The victims went missing when the flight vanished more than a decade ago.
The Lockheed F-104 Starfighter was fast, beautiful, and a death trap, earning the “flying coffin” nickname while suffering over thirty mishaps per 100000 flight hours (it was also known as the “Missile with a Man in It”). Over 50% of F-104s in Canadian service were lost in crashes, over 30% in German.
The SR-72 "Darkstar" from Top Gun: Maverick is a fictionalized version of Lockheed Martin's real, but highly classified, hypersonic aircraft program, intended as a successor to the SR-71 Blackbird for intelligence, reconnaissance (ISR), and strike missions, potentially flying by the 2030s, with prototypes exploring Mach 6+ speeds using advanced Turbine-Based Combined Cycle (TBCC) engines, though official confirmation of flight-ready models remains secret.