Study brings good news for travel lovers

Commercial air travel is safer than ever, with the risk of death halving every decade, a new study has found.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that the death rate fell to one per 13.7 million passengers globally in the period 2018-2022, a significant improvement from one per 7.9 million passengers in the period 2008-2017.

These numbers are a far cry from the beginning of commercial air travel, when there was one death for every 350,000 flights between 1968 and 1977.

“Aviation safety continues to improve,” said MIT professor Arnold Barnett, who co-authored the study.

From 1978 to 1987, the risk of death was one per 750,000 passengers on board.

From 1988 to 1997, the risk of death was one in 1.3 million, while from 1998 to 2007, the risk of death was one in 2.7 million.

The last major commercial aviation disaster in the US was in 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed, killing 50 people. But Professor Barnett warned that continued progress was not guaranteed.

Recent crashes on U.S. runways have made headlines this year, as federal investigators press Boeing over why a door plug on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 broke off mid-flight in January.

The headline figures mask huge global disparities in air safety, with the study dividing countries into three tiers based on their safety records.

The first category includes the United States, European Union countries and other European countries including Montenegro, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, as well as Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan and New Zealand.

The second category consists of Bahrain, Bosnia, Brazil, Brunei, Chile, Hong Kong, India, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

The rest of the world falls into the third category.