A study has found that flying is now safer than ever.
There is a one in 13.7 million chance of a passenger anywhere in the world dying on a plane, according to a study.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US analyzed global passenger and fatality data between 2018 and 2022 and found that airplane deaths have declined by an average of 7% year-on-year.
These results follow a pattern of “continuous improvement” that began in 1968, when the death rate declined by an average of 7.5 percent per year, even as more flights took off and landed.
The study came after the events with the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing, which is facing a number of technical problems that forced it to freeze the test flights of the 777-9 model. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also began inspections of the 787 Dreamliner due to improper movement of the pilot’s seat.
The death rate is 36% higher in some countries
Incidence rates depend on the countries people are flying from and to, with researchers dividing countries into three levels of low, medium and high risk based on their air travel safety data.
The lowest risk is the Tier 1 group, which includes the European Union, Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Montenegro, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Some examples of Tier 2 countries include Bahrain, Bosnia, Brazil, Brunei, Chile, Hong Kong, India, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and United Arab Emirates.
“A passenger can, on average, choose a random flight every day for 220,000 years (!) before succumbing to a fatal accident.”
Is airline security still improving?
The rest of the world is in level 3 or the high risk group.
For the top two levels, the risk of death drops to one in 80 million passengers, the study found. These countries account for more than half of the world’s 8 billion people.
“At this rate, an average passenger could choose a flight at random every day for 220,000 years before dying in a fatal accident,” the report continued.
The risk of death was about 36% higher for Tier 3 countries, the study found, but deaths were still falling.
“While (these nations) continue to improve over time, the risk of death for their passengers remains many times higher than the risk elsewhere,” the study said.
The study also did not include any incidents that were direct attacks on passengers, such as the 2021 suicide bombing at Kabul airport that killed 170 Afghans and 13 American soldiers.
Over 4,000 died of COVID infection on a plane
The study also refers to the COVID-19 pandemic, which it defines as the period from March 2020 to December 2022. Although there were fewer travelers during the pandemic, those who did travel faced “a new source of risk ‘ to be exposed to a virus in flight.
Airlines at the time told passengers that transmission of COVID-19 was “impossible,” the researchers said in their study, even though the U.S. general medical community estimated that 96 percent of flights during that period had at least one positive passenger.
Despite this new risk, the researchers said there was “no evidence that those who flew were at greater risk of death from plane crashes or attacks than would be expected if the pandemic had never occurred.”
“In addition to the transmission of COVID-19 on board, passenger safety has improved dramatically,” the study said.
In total, the report estimates that about 4,760 people died from in-flight infection with COVID-19 from March 2020 to December 2022.
The MIT researchers acknowledge that it is difficult to know the exact number of deaths because passengers who became infected after a flight could pass it on to others who may have died.
“These estimates of COVID-19 deaths are necessarily inaccurate,” the study said. “And while they use lower-quality parameter estimates, they can be very high.”
Their data also did not account for travelers under 18 and did not distinguish between the ages of travelers over 65, which the researchers say is important because death rates rise sharply among older people.