Back in the 1970s, when charter travel really took off, the risk of dying in a plane crash was far greater than it is today. Every time, one million passengers then boarded an airplane around the world, over five of them died in an accident. But since then, safety has been greatly improved, and although there are still plane disasters, the risk is now down to less than 0.25 deaths per year. one million travellers, globally. In other words, the risk of falling from a plane is twenty times less now than in the 1970s. This is shown by figures from the statistics website Our World in Data from Oxford University, which has looked at the long-term trends in flight safety. Counting everything together Last year there were seven fatal accidents, in which a total of 179 people lost their lives. This is shown by the latest count from the aviation consultancy To70, based on statistics from the UN’s aviation organisation, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The figures include all persons who have died in connection with commercial air traffic, regardless of whether they were passengers or people on the ground, and regardless of the causes of the accident. Terrorism and the shooting down of aircraft are also included. Most of the deaths last year occurred when a Boeing 737 from China Eastern Airlines crashed outside the city of Wuzhou. Some of the accidental deaths from last year were not plane passengers themselves, but still count in the statistics. For example, two people were killed when, for unknown reasons, they chose to drive their motorbike onto the runway at an airport in Guinea, just as an Airbus A320 was about to take off. And in another case, an airport employee was sucked into a jet engine, while the plane was on the ground with the engines running. Big difference in safety in different countries Although it has become significantly safer to fly, when you look at the whole world’s air traffic as a whole, it is important to remember that the figures cover big differences between the countries and between the different airlines, where some have a far better security than others. This shows a review from 2020 by a professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Professor Arnold Barnett himself suffers from a fear of flying, and began to take a closer look at the numbers to calm himself down a bit. The figures show that in regions such as the EU and the USA, safety is generally even better than the global average, whereas some companies in Asia, Latin America and Africa in particular are below average. But even in the group of countries where aviation safety is the worst, safety today is about twice as good as it was at the beginning of the 2000s, so it is now on a par with where the western countries were 40-50 years ago years ago. “The risk is so small that if you are afraid of flying, it is a bit like being afraid of going into a supermarket because you are afraid that the building might collapse,” writes Arnold Barnett.
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Far fewer now die in plane crashes
