Chance of death from flying has halved in a decade

Researchers in the US have good news for nervous passengers: Commercial flights are far safer now than ever before

Nervous flyers have less to fear than they did 10 years ago, with the chance of death as an aeroplane passenger having halved, experts have found. 
Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said commercial flights were far safer than they ever have been, with the risk of dying falling almost 40-fold since the 1960s.
One in every 13.7 million commercial aeroplane passengers globally between 2018 and 2022 met with a fatal incident – a significant improvement from 1 per 7.9 million passengers in 2008 to 2017.
Flying today is far safer than in the 1960s and 70s, when one person died for every 350,000 boardings worldwide. Experts said the risk had fallen by 50 per cent per decade since the 1960s.
“Aviation safety continues to get better,” said Dr Arnold Barnett, an MIT academic and co-author of the paper.
“You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can’t get below, and yet, the chance of dying during an air journey keeps dropping by about 7 per cent annually, and continues to go down by a factor of two every decade,” he said.
Death numbers have fallen because of improvements in airline safety and air traffic management. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said that in the last 10 years, the industry had improved its overall safety performance by 48 per cent.
IATA calculated that at the current level of safety, on average a passenger would have to travel by air every day for 103,239 years to experience a fatal accident.
However, MIT found there were major disparities in air travel safety globally, with poorer countries experiencing 36.5 times as many fatalities as nations such as Britain, the US and Australia.
In Jan 2023, a Yeti Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Pokhara crashed into a gorge one mile from the airport, killing all 68 passengers and four crew members.
In September last year, a Manaus Airlines flight from Manaus to Barcelos in Brazil crashed in bad weather, with the loss of 14 passengers and crew.
Overall in 2023, there were only six fatal commercial aircraft accidents globally, leading to 115 deaths, compared with 12 accidents in 2022, and 229 deaths.
The causes of accidents studied by the researchers included turbulence, ground damage, loss of control, undershooting or overshooting the runway, tail strike, heavy landings and gear problems.
Experts compared the improvements with “Moore’s Law”, the observation that innovators keep finding ways to double the processing power of computer chips roughly every 18 months.
“Here we have an aerial version of Moore’s Law,” said Dr Barnett, adding that passengers are about 39 times safer than they were in 1968-1977.
However, the researchers said the pandemic may have caused a sizable – though temporary – new risk stemming from flying.
The study estimates that from June 2020 to Feb 2021, before vaccines were widely available, there were about 1,200 deaths in the US from Covid-19 associated, directly or indirectly, with its transmission on passenger planes.
Most of those fatalities were of not passengers themselves, but of people who got Covid-19 from others who had contracted it during air travel.
In addition, the study estimates that from March 2020 to Dec 2022, about 4,760 deaths around the globe were linked to the transmission of Covid-19 on aeroplanes.
The Covid figures were calculated separately and not included in the air accident death rate.
The findings were published in the Journal of Air Transport Management.