Flight – the safest way to travel?
According to a new study, it has never been safer to travel on commercial airlines
The study – Aviation Safety: A Whole New World, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Arnold Barnett – analyses global passenger fatalities and finds that numbers of air travellers killed around the world is on a steady decrease. Between 2008 and 2017, fatalities fell significantly compared with the period 1998-2007; air passenger fatality rates now sit at one death per 7.9 million boardings, compared with one per 2.7 million boardings in the previous period. The decade before – 1988-1997 – saw one death per 1.3 million boardings.
Additionally, Barnett’s study found interesting regional variations in terms of airline safety. The US, EU, Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan and New Zealand were the safest, while those with an ‘intermediate’ risk level were mostly Asian, South American and Middle Eastern countries. The least safe tended to fall in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
“The worldwide risk of being killed had been dropping by a factor of two every decade,” said Barnett, an expert in aviation safety and risk. “Not only has that continued in the last decade, the [most recent] improvement is closer to a factor of three. The pace of improvement has not slackened at all, even as flying has gotten ever safer and further gains become harder to achieve. That is really quite impressive and is important for people to bear in mind.”
When compiling the study, Barnett made use of data from the World Bank, the International Civil Aviation Organisation and the Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network Accident Database.
“Major new developments in recent years include exceptionally strong safety achievements in China – which is slated to be the world’s largest aviation nation within five years – and the Eastern European members of the EU, which had a fatality-free record in the last decade that constituted the Union’s strongest performance,” Barnett writes in the study’s abstract. “A troubling aspect of the findings is that the less developed nations did not gain in aviation safety relative to other countries, despite having considerably more room for improvement.”
The full study can be found here.