That last one hit close to my heart because that I am a life-long aviation enthusiast and perpetual flight student and that is my home field. There is no excuse for it but it happens with alarming regularity usually on a smaller scale. I read all of the NTSB crash reports that I can because they are available online and flying magazines publish notable ones every month. The striking thing is how many high-time private pilots die during routine trips. Some of them fly straight into the side of a mountain in an area that they have been to hundreds of times before just because they got distracted. Aviation is not a cheap pursuit at all so the people getting killed may not be famous to you but many of them are wealthy and notable.
There is a general idea that airplanes are much safer than cars or just about any other form of travel. That is completely true when we are taking about airliners but it is false when it comes to smaller planes. They can be as safe as you are but the overall safety record is only a little better than motorcycles because people make dumb mistakes and they can become fatal quickly in a smaller plane at low altitude. They aren’t inherently dangerous per se but you do have to pay close attention to absolutely everything every single flight because even one missed item on the checklist could mean the difference between life and death. Airlines enforce that strictly but Private pilots and Charter Operators can get too complacent and lazy.
I believe the biggest difference is that true celebrities tend to fly on larger charter planes with professional flight crews rather than just piling into a small plane these days. A lot (but not all) of the more notable crashes and deaths in the past were from celebrities that just hopped on a small plane with little planning using a flight crew that was more amicable than qualified to fly.
The safety record of the charter flights is still much worse than the airliners but you can easily go a few years without a high-profile accident if you get lucky.
There is an interview in the March issue of “Smithsonian Air and Space” magazine with Tom Costello. He has covered aviation for NBC News the last decade. When asked if his job has made him wary of flying, he replies no, in fact he is convinced more than ever that flying is the safest form of transportation. Far safer than driving to the airport.
I’d like to add Melanie Thornton to the list, who died in an air accident in 2001 - which I think is reasonably contemporaneous for the purposes of this thread. It seems she was bigger in Europe than in the United States, but I’m sure she’d count as a celebrity.
Rhoads is one of the most famous hard rock/heavy metal guitarists of all time (though it has to be said that his fame is partly due to his death). He’s certainly the most famous out of the dozen guitarists who have played with Ozzy Osbourne (excluding Tony Iommi), even though he was only around for two studio albums.
Personally, I think he’s hugely overrated. But it’s ridiculous to say he’s not a famous person. News of his death was carried in every major US newspaper.
To call this a design flaw suggests that it was the fault of Burt Rutan, the plane’s designer.
In fact the flaw you are referring to is a departure from Rutan’s design. The original design did route fuel lines through the passenger compartment, which was part of the rational for the change.
Back to the original question, in my involvement with general aviation I have observed what I call “rich guy syndrome”. Wealthy individuals adopt a habit of letting underlings handle details, and place a high value on their own time. This leads to them assuming things are in order rather than checking themselves during a pre-flight. Also, with their time being so valuable and all, there is an even stronger temptation to attempt to complete a flight in marginal weather conditions. Finally, if they have passengers, failure to complete a flight may seem like a sign of incompetence.
In general, I think the real reason may be 24 hour news cycle. Just like how every child abduction is in the national news for months, celebrity plane crashes tend to get far more press now than they used to, so the celebrity’s tend to be far more aware of the dangers and avoid them.
Singer and reality TV star Jenni Rivera was a lot more famous in Mexico than the U.S. but I think she qualifies. She was killed in along with six others when the LearJet they were travelling in crashed in the mountains of Northern Mexico in December 2012.
As somebody said above, there’s really two disjoint categories of celebrity accident: celebrity dies while riding as a passenger in a chartered aircraft, a commercial airliner, or their personal bizjet, versus celebrity dies while piloting their own aircraft, be it great or small. Those two situations have almost nothing in common and deserve separate treatment.
As to the former:
I’m going to suggest that the difference between the 1970s and before versus the 1980s & subsequent is mostly the much higher quality & professionalism of the charter / bizjet industry now vs. then.
Jan 1 1980 wasn’t a solid dividing line, but more a time point where I choose to say the improvements really got going to achieve critical mass.
Any difference between, say 1990 and today is almost purely statistical noise.
As to the latter:
Flying your own airplane goes in and out of style as a rich person hobby. Right now it’s pretty out. In roughly the 1980s it was more in. In professional aviation we have a saying: “A fool and his money are soon flying more aircraft than he can handle.”
That doesn’t explain every celebrity pilot death, but it does most of them. Most of the rest of the reasons were covered by Shagnasty’s excellent post above.
One famous person who has survived two private plane crashes in 2002 and 2010 is NASCAR team owner Jack Roush. The 2002 plane crash in a lake in Alabama was especially close because Roush was underwater, unconscious from a concussion. Fortunately a former Marine was nearby in a boat and rescued him, applying CPR despite suffering cramps and first degree burns.
I don’t think anybody has mentioned the 2010 crash of a Polish Air Force jet near Smolensk, Russia, which killed the president of Poland and his entire entourage, including World War II veterans, members of Parliament, most of the senior officers of the Polish military, one of the co-founders of the Solidarity trade union, etc.
Another recent one was Ted Stevens, although he was in an old bush plane that was of similar vintage to the planes involved in most of the crashes in the OP.