Small Plane Crash Near St. Augustine, Florida

Small plane crash

ORLANDO, FL –  According to Mynews13.com, a small plane took off from Orlando, Florida on Thursday, December 20, 2018, and was heading towards New Jersey when it crashed close to St. Augustine.

Two people were on the plane at the time of the crash, which occurred about 2 miles from the inlet. The plane made a distress call at around 9:45 in the morning. Helicopter crews and a boat responded to the scene to search for the plane. No further information has been reported.

Small planes are safer now than they were in decades past, but small private planes are still considered somewhat dangerous and are far more dangerous than commercial flights. Industry airlines have managed to improve their safety by nearly 80 percent within the last decade or a little more than a decade. While a flight on a small plane is far safer than it was in the 1970s, the improving safety for these types of aircraft has remained fairly stagnant in the last ten years.

Statistically, private planes might outrank cars as the most dangerous type of transportation in the United States. The number of persons killed in automobile accidents is about 30,000 while only 400 people or so are killed in private plane crashes each year. Of course, there are far more people driving cars and other passenger vehicles than there are people traveling in private planes.

It is difficult to compare the risks of cars to private planes as fatalities per miles traveled is a meaningless measurement. By some measurements, private plane travel is around 19 times as deadly car travel. Much of the safety equipment and many of the redundancies that are used by commercial airlines are not used in private planes which means that small private aircraft are more hazardous than commercial planes even when the experience of the pilot is not considered.