14:50 JST, August 21, 2024
WASHINGTON (AFP-Jiji) — Flying can be a nerve-wracking experience for many people, but a new study published on August 8 shows that commercial air travel is becoming increasingly safer, with the risk of death halving every decade.
According to a paper by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the global fatality rate dropped to 1 in 13.7 million passengers boarding flights between 2018 and 2022. This is a significant improvement from 1 in 7.9 million passengers boarding flights between 2008 and 2017.
It is also a far cry from the beginnings of commercial aviation: in the period 1968-1977 there was 1 fatality for every 350,000 passengers.
“Airline safety is getting better and better,” said MIT professor Arnold Barnett, a co-author of the study published in the Journal of Air Transport Management, adding that the chance of dying “decreases by a factor of two every decade.”
Barnett compared this trend to “Moore’s Law,” Intel founder Gordon Moore’s famous prediction that chip processing power would double roughly every 18 months.
From 1978 to 1987, the risk of dying was 1 in 750,000 passengers boarding; from 1988 to 1997 it was 1 in 1.3 million; and from 1998 to 2007 it was 1 in 2.7 million.
The last major commercial aviation disaster in the United States occurred in 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed, killing 50 people.
Barnett cautioned, however, that continued progress is not assured. Recent near-collisions on U.S. runways this year have made headlines, while federal investigators have pressed Boeing to explain why a door plug on a 737 MAX 9 plane came loose mid-flight from an Alaskan Airlines jet in January.
Key figures also conceal the large global differences in aviation safety. The study classifies countries into three levels based on their safety performance.
The top tier consists of the United States, European Union countries and other European countries, including Montenegro, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan and New Zealand complete this group.
The second category consists of Bahrain, Bosnia, Brazil, Brunei, Chile, Hong Kong (excluding China), India, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and United Arab Emirates.
The remaining countries in the world fall into tier three. While the risk of dying in these countries is much higher, it is encouraging that their air travel fatalities per boarding have also been roughly halved between 2018 and 2022.
