The first widely recognized powered airplane crash happened on 17 September 1908 at Fort Myer, Virginia, USA, during a demonstration of a Wright Brothers aircraft for the U.S. Army. In this accident, the Wright Flyer piloted by Orville Wright crashed after a propeller failure, seriously injuring him and killing passenger Lt. Thomas Selfridge, who is regarded as the first person to die in an airplane accident.

If you include all types of flying machines, many historians point to an earlier fatal aviation accident on 15 June 1785, when Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier died in a balloon accident while attempting to cross the English Channel.