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With everything that’s been in the news lately, you’d be forgiven for thinking that flying in an airplane become a little more risky.
Boeing continues with hearings after a door blew off Air Alaska flight there were scenes of it earlier this year severe turbulence resulting in injuries and death, planes being struck by lightning and a host of other headline-grabbing incidents.
But despite all this, a new MIT study has shown that air travel is becoming safer every decade.
Specifically, commercial flight has become about twice as safe every decade since the 1960s, according to the Federal Aviation Administration Study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technologypublished in the Journal of Air Transport Management.
The statistics
The study did include an analysis of the risk of COVID-19, but quantified this separately from the long-term safety trend, which is based on accidents and deliberate attacks on aviation.
The data shows that flyers are 39 times safer than half a century ago, when one in 350,000 passengers was at risk of dying in the air.
From 1978 to 1987, that number grew to one in 750,000 and one in 1.3 million from 1988 to 1997.
From 1998 to 2007, one in 2.7 million people were at risk, and between 2007 and 2017, one in 7.9 million.
Over time, the number of travelers has fallen drastically to one in 13.7 million travelers between 2018 and 2022.
By comparison, the chance of dying in a car accident is just one in 93 and the chance of dying from heart disease is one in six, according to Forbes.
Even the chance of being attacked and killed by a shark is higher: one in 3.75 million.
Improvements keep coming
“Aviation safety is getting better and better,” says professor and study author Arnold Barnett.
‘You might think there is an irreducible level of risk that we can’t get below, and yet the risk of dying while flying continues to fall by around seven per cent every year, and continues to decline by a factor of two every ten years. “
“After decades of sharp improvements, it’s very difficult to keep improving at the same pace. And yet they do,” Barnett said.
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