Air Travel Keeps Getting Safer

Boeing released its Q3 results on Wednesday, with more than $6 billion in net losses. The aircraft manufacturer has been mired in problems since the start of the year, starting with a safety scare when a Boeing 737 Max jet filled with passengers lost a panel during a flight. 

Despite this and the string of safety allegations that followed, new analysis from researchers at MIT shows that commercial flight is safer than ever. According to MIT professor Arnold Barnett and former graduate student Jan Reig Torra, worldwide death risk per boarding has dropped by about a factor of two every decade since 1968. Where chances of death were one in 350,000 cases between 1968-1977, those odds had diminished to one per 13.7 million passengers between 2018-2022. The study did note, however, that through the principal years of the pandemic, thousands of people are estimated to have died linked, either directly or indirectly, to the transmission of the coronavirus on commercial planes.

Researchers also found that, while the risk is still low, flying is safer in some parts of the world than others. Countries were categorized into three tiers, based on commercial air safety records. The first and safest tier included countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, countries in the European Union, as well as several other nations including Australia, China, Japan and New Zealand. The second tier meanwhile includes nations such as Brazil, India, Malaysia, South Korea, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates. For these two groups, the fatality risk was calculated at around 1 per 80 million plane boardings between 2018-2022. According to the report, fatalities were 36.5 times more likely in the countries in the third tier than in the top tier in 2018-2022.