Airplane Safety Timeline 1970-2024

While the number of commercial flights globally has steadily increased (except for a dip during the Covid-19 pandemic), overall safety has increased as the number of fatal accidents has decreased. Using data from Our World in Data where they calculated the number of fatal accidents per million commercial flights, I added historical aviation safety and regulatory milestones to this timeline chart.

METHODOLOGY NOTE: Because the OWID data ended at 2021, I manually calculated my own numbers for the years 2022, 2023 and 2024 using data from the International Civil Aviation Organization, Air Transport Action Group and Aviation Safety Network. Note that the 2024 number used in calculations for total commercial flights was an estimated forecast. Also, the OWID methodology, which I tried to replicate for these 3 years, did not specify if they included cargo, charter or other types of flights in their fatal accidents criteria. So I chose to include fatal accidents that I felt best fit their criteria, including accidents other than "military or corporate” in planes with 14 seats or more, sourced from the Aviation Safety Network database.

The safety acts, rules, laws, and milestones were sourced from FAA documents and general sites like Wikipedia. So these milestones tend to be US-based though they rippled out through the global aviation world and airlines over the ensuing years. 

PERSONAL NOTE: This visual is the culmination of a larger project that has been in progress since August 2022. It was originally going to be focused on specific historical commercial airplane accidents and their safety legacy. I was starting to create an interactive database and timeline as the number of critical accidents was over 100 and not possible to condense into a single static graphic. But since I had finally completed the milestone research and found the OWID line graph, I decided to condense it into a single static visual just to wrap up the project for its first phase. It was nearly complete when the news broke of the mid-air collision over Reagan airport in D.C. Suddenly everyone was talking about TCAS, Colgan Air (the last major crash on US soil and the impetus for several safety milestones) and aviation safety in general.

So I prioritized this graphic to get it out as aviation safety is nuanced and not always well understood. Synchronicity! I hope this helps contextualize the recent accident, an accident which never should have happened and which should never happen again. The US has some of the highest standards of aviation safety in the world, but clearly there are still more lessons to be learned.