Flying has become twice as safe every decade since 1960s: MIT study

Commercial air travel has become twice as safe every decade since 1968, a new study by MIT researchers found.

As per the study, the risk of a fatality from commercial air travel during 2018-2022 was 1 per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally, a remarkable improvement from 1 per 7.9 million boardings in 2008-2017.

In 1968-1977, it was 1 per every 350,000 boarding, the study further said.

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

The paper titled “Airline safety: Still getting better?” is featured in the August issue of the Journal of Air Transport Management.

“You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can’t get below… and yet, the chance of dying during an air journey keeps dropping by about 7 per cent annually, and continues to go down by a factor of two every decade," Barnett, a leading expert in air travel safety and operations, further said.

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Continuous improvement in airline safety isn’t guaranteed; some of the high-profile near-collisions on US runways over the past year highlight that airline safety is an ongoing challenge.

Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic might have introduced a significant — though likely temporary — new risk associated with flying. The study examines this risk separately from the long-term safety trend, which focuses on accidents and deliberate attacks on aviation.

Barnett draws a parallel between the long-term improvements in air safety and “Moore’s Law,” the principle that technological advancements double the computing power of chips approximately every 18 months. In this context, commercial air travel has become about twice as safe each decade since the late 1960s.

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“Here we have an aerial version of Moore’s Law,” Barnett says, who has contributed to refining air travel safety statistics for many years.

In pre-boarding terms, passengers are now about 39 times safer compared to the 1968-1977 period.

The separate finding regarding Covid-19’s impact focused on cases transmitted by airline passengers during the pandemic. This analysis is distinct from the main data, which assesses airline incidents during standard operations. However, Barnett felt it was important to investigate the specific case of viral transmission during the pandemic.

The study estimates that from June 2020 to February 2021, before Covid vaccines became widely available, approximately 1,200 deaths in the US were associated, directly or indirectly, with the transmission on passenger planes. Most of these fatalities likely involved individuals who contracted the virus from others who were infected during air travel.

The study also estimates that from March 2020 through December 2022, around 4,760 deaths globally were linked to Covid-19 transmission on airplanes. These estimates are based on available data on transmission rates and daily death rates, and they consider the age demographics of air passengers during the pandemic.

“There’s no simple answer to this,” Barnett says. “But we worked to provide realistic and conservative estimates so that people can learn important lessons from what happened. I believe people should at least review these numbers.”

The researchers utilised data from the Flight Safety Foundation, the World Bank, and the International Air Transport Association to study fatalities during normal airline operations.

Various metrics have been used to evaluate air travel risks, including deaths per billion passenger miles and fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours. However, Barnett considers deaths per passenger boarding the most “defensible” and comprehensible statistic

The new paper focuses more on empirical results than on explaining them, while Barnett suggests that a combination of factors contributes to this trend, including technological advancements like collision avoidance systems, extensive training, and rigorous efforts by organizations such as the US Federal Aviation Agency and the National Transportation Safety Board.