I went on an air crash/failure reading binge on Wikipedia a few months ago.

One of the things I noticed was that outside of total structural failure-- the plain broke up in flight from bombing or structural failure, or a microburst tumbled it on the runway, or controlled descent into terrain-- the farther back in time the incident occurred, the more likely it seems to have been for casualties to be minimal, and better odds that the pilot can safely land the plane even with structural failures.

I'm curious why that is. The effect seemed to persistent through to the early 80s, after which a lot more "all onboard were lost" seems to have occurred.

Sampling error? A lot more wartime pilots (bad military pilots in war die, so after a war your surviving pilots are overall more competent/familiar with handling emergencies)? Too many new sensors/alerts, or overreliance on those by poorly trained pilots? Are new planes built with lighter/less strong materials? Is it just that there are a lot more flights now?

I go on reading binges like that a lot, but that one in particular has stuck with me, probably because I've been in a plane that was seconds from unrecoverable stall, and seen a (military) plane go down just a few miles away, with the loss of all onboard.

Plus I have bad luck civilian flying. Every time I get on a plane it seems to encounter awful turbulence, or be flying into tornados. (My little brother was skeptical about my claims of bad luck on planes until we flew together, haha.)