Absolutely. My dad plays the flight simulator X-Plane, he says that if these pilots can even make it to being airlines certified, they are most definitely experts in their field.
Also, FAA records are a big log to go through; they store everything, so you can see reports as far back as the beginning of civil aviation. 1948 was 75 years ago, aerospace is no computer science but it’s a distant second followed by a much more distant third. Imagine the difference between the deHavilland Comet and the Boeing 787 in terms of how many deaths occurred aboard the plane models and you have the magnitude of improvement gained by learning very, VERY well from every crash ever.
I honestly don’t get why my brother has aerophobia, I am far more terrified of passing on a two-way road and cloverleaf interchanges than an aircraft losing a major system, because unless that system is a wing or part of the tail, engineered redundancies make that kind of crash landing more survivable on average than the kind of black ice followed by post-crash blizzard bullshit I experienced in 2020.
Sorry, just a complaint about waiting an hour and a half for the ambulance when one of us accidentally undid her seatbelt in her sleep (pressure from her bag pressed the release button) and woke up with her jacket on top of her and her spine damaged by being slammed into the center panel.
My point is, cars are fucking terrifying compared to planes.