Air Travel - How Safe is it?

You are nineteen times less likely to die in a plane crash, than in a car accident.

That is what I read.

However, with the spate of air crashes we have seen in the recent past – including the TransAsia flight that crashed in Taipei, Taiwan on Wednesday – I found it hard to believe.

The number of commercial air-crashes, you will agree, have clearly increased.

And common sense, if not statistical probability, tells us that chances of air-crashes are directly proportional to the increase in the number of flights. Right?

Wrong. In 2013, the number of people killed in flight accidents worldwide was 265 - the safest year in aviation since 1945.

That figure is from a CNN article very aptly titled, “Is 2014 the deadliest year for flights? Not even close.” (You can see interesting graphs at this link)

It is just over 100 years since the Wright brothers invented the aircraft, but already crisscrossing the globe, at any given moment, are a few thousands of commercial aircraft.

Yes. You can check out the global air traffic – live – at flightradar24.com.

Commercial air travel has increased in ways unthought-of, by aviation pioneers. The numbers of airlines and airplanes, airports and passengers have had such an astounding growth that it would put the word ‘exponential’ to embarrassment.

But maybe it is an advantage. An article in Travel and Leisure (March 2014), titled “Why Airplanes Are Safe” says this: “In the past 50 years, the world’s commercial airliners have racked up nearly one billion flight hours, providing an industry meticulous about recordkeeping with a steady stream of information that is used to constantly improve the design of airplanes and engines”.

“We’re getting better,” says Bill Bozin, vice president of safety at Airbus Americas in the article, explaining that all this information gives engineers a truer understanding of the machine’s limits.

Also agreeing with them is a website called anxieties.com. It says, "No other form of transportation is as scrutinized, investigated and monitored as commercial aviation".

One Dr. Arnold Barnett, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has done extensive research in the field of commercial flight safety. He found that over the fifteen years between 1975 and 1994, the death risk per flight was 'one in seven million'.

This statistic is the probability that someone who randomly selected one of the airline's flights over the 19-year study period would be killed in route. He says, "That means that any time you board a flight on a major carrier in this country (USA), your chance of being in a fatal accident is one in seven million. It doesn't matter whether you fly once every three years or every day of the year".

"In fact, based on this incredible safety record, if you did fly every day of your life, probability indicates that it would take you nineteen thousand years before you would succumb to a fatal accident”. Nineteen thousand years!

Dr. Barnett of MIT also compared the chance of dying from an airline accident versus a driving accident, after accounting for the greater number of people who drive each day. He found that you are nineteen times safer in a plane than in a car.

In USA which has the world’s highest number of flights at any given time, the chance of a person dying from a cardiovascular disease is 50%. But the chance of dying from an air crash is a one-hundred-thousandth of one percent (.000014%)!

So, ladies and gentleman, Next time we fly, even if we are afraid, let us thank God for statistics, sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.


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