“A passenger could on average choose a flight at random every day for 220,000 years before succumbing to a fatal accident,” the study found.
A new study found that one in 13.7 million flight passengers worldwide die.
MIT researchers examined global passenger statistics from 2018 to 2022 and found that plane mortality declined by 7% year.
These figures show a “continuous improvement” trend that began in 1968 when the death rate dropped by 7.5% each year as flight numbers climbed worldwide.
Some countries have 36% higher mortality.
However, incident rates vary by departure and destination countries. Based on aviation safety records, experts classified countries as low, medium, or high risk.
Tier 1—the EU, Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Montenegro, Norway, New Zealand, Switzerland, the UK, and the US—is the safest.
Bahrain, Bosnia, Brazil, Brunei, Chile, Hong Kong, India, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and the UAE are Tier 2 countries.
Global danger is category 3, the highest.
The study found that among 80 million passengers in the first two tiers, which include countries with more than half of the world’s 8 billion population, death is rare.
“At this rate, a passenger could on average choose a flight at random every day for 220,000 years before succumbing to a fatal accident ,” the study said.
The study found that level 3 countries had a 36% higher fatal accident rate, however the trend is downward.
“Although these countries continue to improve over time, the risk of passenger death remains significantly higher than elsewhere ,” the study found.
This excludes premeditated passenger attacks like the 2021 Kabul airport suicide bombing that killed 170 Afghans and 13 American soldiers.