Safety in the skies

By Allison Yuan

Devastating plane crashes in just a few months – are we overlooking the risks of air travel, or is it still the safest way to reach our destination?

Just in the past few weeks, the nation has gotten into a frenzy over the safety of air travel. Domestically, there have been many air incidents: the DC crash of the mid-air collision between an American Airlines flight with the military Black Hawk helicopter, the medical Learjet 55 crash in a Philadelphia neighborhood, and the Alaska Bering Air crash near Nome, Western Alaska. Internationally, this past holiday season, there have been tragic incidents from the Christmas Day crash of Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer E190 to four days later the Jeju airline crash at Muan International Airport. 

With these many crash reports, it’s hard not to be anxious and weary of flying. But to give it straight, yes, air travel is still the safest mode of transportation, especially on US commercial airlines. 

According to the 2024 Transportation Statistics Report from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, air travel was marked as the safest form of transportation. In the report, it states:

“Transportation incidents for all modes claimed 44,546 lives in 2022, of which all but 2,032 involved highway motor vehicles. Preliminary estimates for 2023 suggest a further decline in fatalities,” the report says. “There were no deaths from crashes on large commercial airlines in 2023, but several hundred deaths occurred in crashes in general aviation, commuter air, and air taxi services.” 

Moreover, in the most recent International Air Transportation Association (IATA) report, it called 2023 “an exceptionally safe year” in the commercial airline sector. There was no fatal accident and had a fatality risk rate of 0.03 per million sectors, meaning “on average a person would have to travel by air every day for 103,239 years to experience a fatal accident.” Though the report on 2024 has yet to come out it’s safe to report that within the last 10 years the airline industry has improved its safety performance to over 61%. 

In a study by a professor of statistics at MIT, it highlights the way air travel has been getting safer. The primary conclusion was that, from 2018 to 2022, the global fatality risk per boarding was 1 in 13.7 million. To put that into perspective, getting killed in a shark attack or giving birth to quadruplets is far more likely than dying in a plane crash. The article also mentions that the risk of a plane crash was one in 7.9 million from 2008 to 2017, which has drastically decreased from one in every 350,000 boardings from 1968 to 1977.

Despite these recent crashes overlooking the high stats on safety of air travel, it’s important to keep in mind what airlines are doing now. In a USA Today article, Jim Brauchle, an aviation attorney at Motley Rice talks on how “one good thing that the aviation community does do is it really does learn from its past experiences and past accidents.” The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board take safety issues and recommendations seriously, examining and investigating each accident in the US. Furthermore, executives at airlines usually stress that they compete with other airlines on schedules, amenities, costs, and other aspects, but never on safety. In order to make flying as safe as possible, manufacturers, airlines, and other industry players collaborate. 

Overall, air travel remains one of the safest modes of transportation, even in the face of recent incidents. The likelihood of a crash is extremely low, and the industry’s dedication to safety ensures that air travel will remain secure for years to come.