Is Flying Safe? The Statistics, Explained
Yes — commercial flying is the safest form of mass transport, and it keeps getting safer. An MIT study put the worldwide death risk at about 1 per 13.7 million passenger boardings for 2018–2022, the long-term accident rate keeps falling, and per mile travelled flying is on the order of 100 times or more safer than driving. Here is what the numbers actually say.
TL;DR
- Worldwide death risk: 1 in 13.7 million boardings (MIT / Barnett, 2018–2022) — down from 1 in 7.9 million (2008–2017) and 1 in 350,000 in the late 1960s.
- The risk per boarding has roughly halved every decade for over half a century — an "aerial Moore's Law".
- Per mile, U.S. commercial air travel is about 177× safer than cars (0.003 vs 0.53 deaths per 100M passenger-miles, BTS 2023).
- Turbulence is the most common cause of airline accidents, but it means injuries to unbelted people — not crashes. Keeping your seatbelt fastened removes almost all of that risk.
How safe is flying, in plain numbers
An August 2024 MIT study (Arnold Barnett and Jan Reig Torra, Journal of Air Transport Management) put the worldwide death risk at 1 per 13.7 million passenger boardings for 2018–2022 — an improvement from 1 in 7.9 million for 2008–2017 and 1 in 350,000 in 1968–1977. Barnett describes the steady ~50% improvement per decade as an "aerial version of Moore's Law".
IATA's safety reporting tells the same story from the accident side. For 2024, IATA recorded an all-accident rate of 1.13 per million flights — one accident for every ~880,000 flights — across 40.6 million flights, and noted that on average a person would have to fly for 49,246 years to experience one fatal accident.
The trend: still improving long-term
Year-to-year headline fatality counts are volatile, because a single major accident dominates the total — so the meaningful signal is the multi-year rate, and it points down. IATA's five-year fatal-accident rate kept improving to about one fatal accident per 5.6 million flights (2021–2025), versus roughly one per 3.5 million a decade earlier. 2025 also recorded no loss-of-control-in-flight accidents — only the second time on record — notable because that category has historically been a leading cause of fatalities.
A caution on reading the data: a year with a higher fatality count is usually one bad event, not a worsening system. Always compare rates over several years, and from a single consistent source, rather than two raw annual counts.
Flying vs driving
By the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics (2023), the death rate was 0.003 per 100 million passenger-miles for commercial air versus 0.53 for cars and trucks — about 177× safer per mile flown. Other per-mile datasets put the gap at roughly two orders of magnitude (around 100×) depending on years and definitions; either way, the difference is enormous. For context on the road side, NHTSA's early estimate puts U.S. motor-vehicle deaths at about 39,300 in 2024.
Statistically, the most dangerous part of most air journeys is the drive to and from the airport. (Which metric you use — per mile, per flight, or per boarding — changes the exact multiplier, so we cite the metric explicitly rather than a single headline number.)
Why flying is statistically so safe
- Redundancy & engineering margins: multiple engines, duplicated flight controls, hydraulics and electrics, and certified fail-safe design.
- Data-driven safety: cockpit voice and flight-data recorders plus Flight Data Monitoring let airlines find and fix risks before they cause accidents.
- Independent investigation: bodies like the NTSB feed every accident's findings back into design, training and procedures — so the system learns.
- Trained, checked crews: recurrent training, structured checklists and Crew Resource Management break human-error chains.
- Protective systems: TCAS (collision avoidance), GPWS/EGPWS (terrain warning) and weather radar cut the historically biggest accident categories.
The role of regulation (ICAO, FAA, EASA)
ICAO sets the global baseline through Standards and Recommended Practices applied across member states, and its Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme (USOAP, since 1999) checks that states actually implement them. National and regional regulators — the FAA in the U.S., EASA in Europe — certify aircraft, airlines, airports and personnel and enforce the rules. This layered, harmonised oversight is a big reason safety records are strongest among carriers in well-regulated jurisdictions; risk is not uniform worldwide, and general aviation and some regions carry materially higher rates than scheduled jet operations.
Turbulence: scary, rarely dangerous
Turbulence is the most common cause of U.S. scheduled-airline (Part 121) accidents — but these almost always mean injuries, not aircraft damage or crashes. NTSB data for 2009–2018 found turbulence behind more than a third of Part 121 accidents, with flight attendants making up about 79% of those seriously injured; the NTSB concluded that wearing a seatbelt whenever seated would virtually eliminate the passenger injury risk. An FAA analysis similarly found the large majority of turbulence injuries were to people not buckled in.
The practical takeaway: turbulence does not break modern airliners, and a fastened seatbelt removes almost all of the personal risk. See our full guide to whether turbulence is dangerous — the data, the six types, and the science — plus our route map of where turbulence is worst.
Related Pages
Sources
- MIT News / Journal of Air Transport Management — Barnett & Reig Torra, "Airline safety: still getting better?" (2024)
- IATA — 2024 and 2025 Annual Safety Reports
- U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics (2023) via USAFacts — air vs road fatality rates
- NTSB SS2101 — turbulence injuries in Part 121 operations; FAA — turbulence guidance
- ICAO USOAP; NHTSA 2024 motor-vehicle fatality estimate
Aggregated from publicly available, primary safety data (MIT, IATA, NTSB, FAA, ICAO, BTS). Figures are cited with their source and basis; statistics describe scheduled commercial operations and are not a guarantee for any individual flight. See Terms of Service.