Risk of death by flying has halved in the past 10 years – despite spate of high profile incidents

Flying commercially keeps getting safer, with the risk of dying becoming half as likely in the past decade, a study has found.

Various high-profile mid-flight incidents may have created nervous flyers, yet researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found that flying is becoming roughly twice as safe each decade since the 1960s.

In mid-January, flight safety came under scrutiny when an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9’s door plug blew off, causing the grounding of all 171 MAX 9 jets by the FAA while they investigated.

In May a British man died and seven people were left in critical condition after being injured during a flight from London to Singapore after tit was struck by severe turbulence.

Despite these incidents, the MIT study shows that flying has become much less dangerous than it was decades ago, with passengers being about 39 times safer than they were in the late 1960s to 1970s.

According to the data, the risk of a fatality from commercial air travel was only one per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally in the 2018 to 2022 period.

Comparing this to boardings in 2009-2017, which was one per 7.9 million, shows there has been a significant improvement in the safety of flying. It is not even comparable to the statistics from 1968-1977, that saw a risk of fatality in one per 350,000 boardings, their study found.

“Aviation safety continues to get better,” Arnold Barnett, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the research results, said.

“You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can’t get below,” Barnett added. “And yet, the chance of dying during an air journey keeps dropping by about seven per cent annually, and continues to go down by a factor of two every decade.”

The researchers acknowledge incidents such as recent near-collisions on runways in the United States that have made many question how safe it is to fly, yet they add that it shows that airline safety is “always an ongoing task”.

There have been various issues plaguing Boeing’s manufacturing reputation in 2024, causing the CEO of Boeing, Dave Calhoun and the company’s chair, Larry Kellner, to announce they would leave by the end of the year.

Before the Alaska Airlines incident, two Boeing 737 disasters had ended in tragedy. In 2018, all 189 crew and passengers lost their lives while on a Lion Air flight from Indonesia after the aircraft plunged into the Java Sea 13 minutes after take-off. Just five months after this incident, an Ethiopian Airlines took off from Addis Ababa and crashed six minutes later only 30 miles from the airport, killing all 157 people on board.

However, the MIT research shows that flying is not becoming more dangerous. Ryanair is currently the safest airline in the world in terms of the number of passengers carried without a single fatal accident and the only aircraft type it flies is the Boeing 737.

Factors including technological advances, such as collision avoidance systems in planes, and extensive training are to thank for the consistent improvement in safety decade by decade.

Not all countries and their airlines are the same. Some nations, such as the United States and EU countries, are leaders in flight safety, while other states are still improving, but not at the same rate.

Barnett concluded that it is actually remarkable how aviation, with the help of governments and airlines, continues to improve and find ways to be safer.

“After decades of sharp improvements, it’s really hard to keep improving at the same rate. And yet they do,” he said.