How Safe Is It To Travel On A Plane? MIT Scientists Have An Answer

Fear of flying is fairly common—as many as 40% of people experience it, according to frequently cited research in Frontiers in Psychology. Viral TikTok videos of extreme turbulence, the January mid-air Boeing door plug blowout incident on an Alaskan Airlines flight, near collisions on runways, as well as headlines about the recent fatal crash outside of São Paulo Brazil can, of course, heighten aviophobia (or the fear of flying) among travelers.

But how safe is it to travel on a plane?

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say that worldwide plane travel continues to get safer, and the risk of dying from commercial air travel is 1 per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally in the 2018 to 2022 period. The fatality risk is down from 1 per 7.9 million boardings in 2008-2017 and a major decrease from the 1 per every 350,000 boardings in 1968 to 1977, according to the new paper that was published this month in Journal of Air Transport Management.

“You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can’t get below,” said Arnold Barnett, a leading expert in air travel safety and operations and the co-author of the research. “And yet, the chance of dying during an air journey keeps dropping by about 7 percent annually, and continues to go down by a factor of two every decade.”

For the study, researchers used data from the Flight Safety Foundation, the World Bank, and the International Air Transport Association. The team addresses COVID’s impact on airplane safety, noting that between March 2020 and December 2022, approximately 4,760 deaths around the world were linked to COVID-19 transmission on airplanes.

Researchers explain that this trend in safer flights can be understood through “Moore’s Law,” which is the observation that innovators find ways to double computing power of chips every roughly 18 months. However, in this case, the MIT team points out, commercial travel has become almost twice as safe in each decade since the late 1960s.

How Safe Is It To Travel on a Plane?

Air travel is a safe way to travel, especially in the United States. The last U.S. airline crash was in February 2009 when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo, New York and killed all 49 people on board was well as a person on the ground. By comparison, nearly 41,000 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2023, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Here are the number of fatalities per passenger boarding on commercial air flights for periods between 1968 and 2022, according to the data analyzed by MIT researchers:

1968-1977: 1 per 350,000

1978-1987: 1 per 750,000

1988-1997: 1 per 1.3 million

1998-2007: 1 per 2.7 million

2007-2017: 1 per 7.9 million

2018-2022: 1 per 13.7 million

Which Countries Are Safest for Flying?

The study author’s pointed out that there are disparities when it comes to the safety of traveling on planes, which means it’s safer to fly in some parts of the world than others.

Researchers organized countries into three tiers based on their aviation safety records.

The top-tier countries for air safety include the United States, European Union countries and other European states, including Montenegro, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom as well as Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, and New Zealand.

Second-tier countries include: Bahrain, Bosnia, Brazil, Brunei, Chile, Hong Kong (which has been distinct from mainland China in air safety regulations), India, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. In each of those two groups of nations, the death risk per boarding over 2018-22 was about 1 per 80 million, according to the study.

The third group consists of every country in the world, and there were 36.5 times as many fatalities per passenger boarding in 2018-2022 than was the case in the top tier, but air travel fatalities per boarding were still reduced in half during the 2018-2022 time period.

What Airline is Safest?

The MIT study didn’t rank individual airlines for safety.

Earlier this year a ranking (note: not an academic study) from AirlineRatings.com, an airline safety and product rating review site, placed Air New Zealand as the top airline for safety.