Flying can be a nerve-wracking experience for many people – but a new study published Thursday shows that commercial air travel is becoming safer and the risk of death is halving every ten years.
According to a study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the global fatality rate fell to 1 per 13.7 million passengers between 2018 and 2022. This represents a significant improvement from 1 per 7.9 million passengers between 2008 and 2017.
Even since the beginning of commercial aviation, this has been a long way from the beginning: between 1968 and 1977, there was one death per 350,000 passengers.
“Flight safety is getting better and better,” said MIT professor Arnold Barnett, co-author of the study, which was published in Journal of Air Traffic Managementand added that the probability of death “continues to decline by a factor of two every ten years.”
Barnett compared the trend to “Moore’s Law,” Intel founder Gordon Moore’s famous prediction that the computing power of chips would double approximately every 18 months.
From 1978 to 1987, the risk of death was 1 per 750,000 passengers, from 1988 to 1997, 1 per 1.3 million, and from 1998 to 2007, 1 per 2.7 million.
The last major accident involving a commercial airline in the United States occurred in 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed, killing 50 people.
But Barnett cautioned that further progress is not guaranteed. Recent near-collisions on U.S. runways this year have grabbed headlines, while federal investigators have pressed Boeing over why a door stopper on an Alaskan Airlines 737 MAX 9 plane came loose in mid-flight in January.
The headline figures also obscure the enormous global differences in flight safety: the study divides countries into three categories based on their safety records.
The top group includes the United States, countries of the European Union and other European countries, including Montenegro, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan and New Zealand complete this group.
The second tier consists of Bahrain, Bosnia, Brazil, Brunei, Chile, Hong Kong (counted separately from China), India, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
The rest of the world falls into the third category. Encouragingly, the number of fatalities per passenger in these countries has also been roughly halved between 2018 and 2022, even though the risk of death is much higher there.
© Agence France-Presse
