SUMMER is the season when the pilots of private planes like to take to the skies. But summer flying often means thunderstorms and extreme changes in weather that can lead to accidents. It’s also a time to think about a system that doesn’t do all it can to protect those pilots and passengers. Flying in small private planes is far riskier than flying in commercial aircraft.

The death of Richard Rockefeller, who crashed his single-engine plane last month in a residential area of Westchester County, N.Y., was just the most recent reminder of the hazards. And while that crash made national headlines, every week there are small plane or helicopter crashes somewhere or other in America that don’t involve a celebrity, politician or businessman.

Just type “private plane crash” or “helicopter crash” into Google Alerts and the updates come in regularly. In January, in Aspen, Colo., a twin-engine private jet crashed and burst into flames, killing one and injuring two. In February, in Nashville, a twin-engine aircraft missed a landing approach and all four people on board died. In March, in Ridgway, Colo., an airplane went into a flat spin, crashed into icy water, and killed five people. Just yesterday, a small plane went down in New Jersey.

The National Transportation Safety Board found that in 2011, 94 percent of fatal aviation accidents occurred in what’s called general aviation. That category includes private small planes flown by amateurs as well as professionally piloted corporate flights in high-powered aircraft, such as the Gulfstream IV jet that crashed in May in Bedford, Mass., killing all seven people on board. By contrast, commercial aviation had no fatal accidents that year. Statistics from the N.T.S.B. show that general aviation aircraft average nearly seven accidents per 100,000 flight hours, compared with an average of 0.16 accidents per 100,000 hours for commercial airlines.