AVIATION SAFETYStudy: Flying Keeps Getting Safer
Reflecting a “Moore’s Law of aviation,” commercial flight has become roughly twice as safe each decade since the 1960s; Covid-19 added a wrinkle, however.
Many airline passengers naturally worry about flying. But on a worldwide basis, commercial air travel keeps getting safer, according to a new study by MIT researchers.
The risk of a fatality from commercial air travel was 1 per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally in the 2018-2022 period — a significant improvement from 1 per 7.9 million boardings in 2008-2017 and a far cry from the 1 per every 350,000 boardings that occurred in 1968-1977, the study finds.
“Aviation safety continues to get better,” says Arnold Barnett, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the research results.
“You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can’t get below,” adds Barnett, a leading expert in air travel safety and operations. “And yet, the chance of dying during an air journey keeps dropping by about 7 percent annually, and continues to go down by a factor of two every decade.”
To be sure, there are no guarantees of continual improvement; some recent near-collisions on runways in the U.S. have gained headlines in the last year, making it clear that airline safety is always an ongoing task.
Additionally, the Covid-19 pandemic may have caused a sizable — though presumably temporary — new risk stemming from flying. The study analyzes this risk but quantifies it separately from the long-term safety trend, which is based on accidents and deliberate attacks on aviation.
Overall, Barnett compares these long-run gains in air safety to “Moore’s Law,” the observation that innovators keep finding ways to double the computing power of chips roughly every 18 months. In this case, commercial air travel has gotten roughly twice as safe in each decade dating to the late 1960s.
“Here we have an aerial version of Moore’s Law,” says Barnett, who has helped refine air travel safety statistics for many years.
In per-boarding terms, passengers are about 39 times safer than they were in the 1968-1977 period.
The paper, “Airline safety: Still getting better?” appears in the August issue of the Journal of Air Transport Management. The authors are Barnett, who is the George Eastman Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Jan Reig Torra MBA ’24, a former graduate student at MIT Sloan.
