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Aviation researchers have reassured passengers that the likelihood of a deadly plane crash is just a blip on the radar.
Despite some very visible and terrifying moments in the skies this year — most notably, a Boeing door plug blowing off an Air Alaska flight — commercial flying has never been safer, a new Massachusetts Institute of Technology study shows.
“You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can’t get below,” said professor and study author Arnold Barnett.
“And yet, the chance of dying during an air journey keeps dropping by about 7% annually, and continues to go down by a factor of two every decade.”
Those figures come in spite of the many headlines of dangerous flights recently — last month flames shot from a broken wheel on an American Airlines flight and a British Airways plane was struck by lightning in midair.
That’s paired with ongoing safety probes into plane manufacturer Boeing, which has had several aviation malfunctions highlighted in recent most.
Regardless, “aviation safety continues to get better,” Barnett maintains in his study published in the journal Journal of Air Transport Management.
Mighty wings
The data shows flyers are 39 times safer than half a century ago when one in 350,000 passengers had a risk of death in the air — that drastically slumped to one in 13.7 million travelers from 2018 to 2022.
And, the statistics show a exponentially safer trend throughout the years. From 1978 to 1987 that number grew to one in 750,000 and one in 1.3 million from 1988 to 1997.
More currently, one in 2.7 million were at risk from 1998 to 2007, then one in 7.9 million in 2007 to 2017.
“After decades of sharp improvements, it’s really hard to keep improving at the same rate. And yet they do,” Barnett said.
However, critics of current air safety urge that the current situation with Boeing and other incidents should not be overlooked.
“There’s a sense of overconfidence,” said Ed Pierson, a director of the Foundation for Aviation Safety.
“The gold standard is melting down, because we continue to try to downplay everything and talk about how safe the system is.”
The Boeing critic continued, “That’s not the right mindset. That’s the mindset that gets people killed.”
