On This Day in History: August 25

Aaliyah dies in a plane crash

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You’re in far greater danger of dying in a car crash on the way to the airport than you are of dying on an airplane. Unless, it seems, you’re a musician. So many musicians have died from plane crashes. The most famous one of the 21st century was R&B singer Aaliyah. 

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 25, 2001--

According to recent statistics from the National Safety Council, in the U.S. you have a whopping one in 114 chance of having that steering wheel blow through the back of your spine as a driver, and a one in 654 chance of dying in a car as a passenger. Cars are un-fucking-safe.

Comparatively, the chance of dying in an airplane is one in 9,821, but that’s heavily skewed toward small planes. The pilots aren’t as well trained in small planes and therefore are more likely to make errors. Also, small planes have fewer redundancies, they are more susceptible to turbulence, weather, and bird strikes. The smacking into birds thing is not only more damaging to small planes, but more common because they fly at lower altitudes. 

And since musicians travel frequently and often in smaller planes, a lot of them make the unhappy news of gravity not being their friend that day. The first notable one was Glenn Miller during World War II. He was a leader of a popular dance band whose plane crashed between England and France in 1944. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper all went down on the same small plane in 1959. Patsy Cline was lost in 1963. Otis Redding in 1967. Jim Croce in 1973. Both the singer and the guitarist for Lynyrd Skynyrd died in a 1977 crash. Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist Randy Rhoades died in 1982 when the small plane he was in tried to “buzz” the tour bus and crashed. Stevie Ray Vaughn died in a helicopter crash in 1990. John Denver died flying his own homebuilt aircraft in 1997. 

And on August 25, 2001, we lost Aaliyah. Known as both the “Princess of R&B” and the “Queen of Urban Pop,” Aaliyah had been named by Billboard as the 10th most popular R&B artist of the last quarter century. She also starred in two feature films, one of which was released posthumously. 

She was only 22 years old and had been filming a music video in the Bahamas. Upon the return to Florida she was traveling in a small twin-engine Cessna. The investigation revealed that the pilot didn’t have the proper qualifications for that type of plane, and had even presented false documents to get his pilot’s license. Also, the plane was overloaded, which a good pilot would have noticed and said no fucking way, we can’t fly with this many people and this much shit. 

But he flew and he crashed and he died and so did Aaliyah and seven other people. 

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