This is getting really scary now.
Apparantly an aircraft departured from Panama, has crashed in Venezuela. 150 people may have been killed.
ATC lost contact with the plane, and reports indicates an explosion in the remote area near the border to Colombia.

So far, both aircraft type and carrier is unknown.

Truly a tragic summer for Commercial Aviation.

Edit: Aircraft belonged to West Caribbean Airways...and I guess it's an MD81/82...s

I just came to post this. Terribly sad. 

Edit: There is also a crash of a helo killing 17 in Afghanistan.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4155916.stm

It's tragic but I wouldn't read anything sinister into this. If you care to search around I'm sure you could find some sort of incident involving aircraft almost every day in some part of the world. Years ago it would have taken several days before this was reported. Now, we get to hear the news complete with pictures from the most remote parts of the world within minutes of it happening.  

We live in an era of instant news & unfortunately the 'media' thrives on this sort of thing. Nothing they like better than a disaster. Most early reports are obviously highly inaccurate & pure speculation. News services seem to have a talent for choosing the most unreliable witnesses & "aviation experts" who have no idea what they're talking about. This can only have the effect of reducing public confidence in air travel even further. It's almost like a deliberate campaign against the aircraft & airline industry. Repeating it or speculating yourself before the full facts are known only makes it worse. You rarely see the same sort of fuss over a railway or road accident although these are just as common. It occurs to me that they wouldn't bother with this sensationalist style of reporting if nobody showed any interest. Joe Public has an insatiable morbid curiosity.

Not a good summer indeed for comercial aviation...

A look at the annual commercial aircraft accident stats published each year in Flight International would show that this is nothing out of the ordinary...

Fortunately this amount of fatalities is rare. Compared with the number of commercial flights every single day this demonstrates just how safe air travel is compared with other forms of transport. It was part of my job to read official incident reports & you might be surprised at how many there are, generally not fatal. I class these recent incidents as coincidence & pure bad luck. We're right in the middle of the holiday season & the airlines are busy. On another day those aircraft might have landed safely. Who knows?