Boeing explosion: How safe is flying?

Experts say we have little reason to fear taking to the skies in modern planes, but how safe is air travel really?

Aviation made headlines for all the wrong reasons this week after the emergency exit door on an Alaska Airlines plane exploded during flight, leaving a gaping hole in the fuselage.

The accident occurred just minutes after the Boeing 737 MAX 9 took off from Portland International Airport in Oregon on Friday with 171 passengers and six crew members on board, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing.

No passengers were killed or seriously injured during the incident, but the US Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded hundreds of Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes for examination, a decision that Boeing said it “fully supports.”

The aircraft manufacturer is under scrutiny after a series of issues with its planes. In 2018, 189 people were killed after a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed into the sea shortly after takeoff from Jakarta, Indonesia. The following year, another 737 MAX 8, operated by Ethiopian Airlines, crashed shortly after take-off in Addis Ababa, killing 157 people.

With aviation accidents frequently in the news, The Week examines the statistics on how much risk airline passengers are exposed to.

What do the numbers say?

Overall, air travel has become safer and more secure. According to a 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study, between 2008 and 2017, there was one death for every 7.9 million passengers on a flight. Between 1998 and 2007, this number approached one death for every 2.7 million passengers.

“The risk of being murdered worldwide decreases by a factor of two every decade,” said Arnold Barnett, author of the MIT study. “The pace of improvement has not slowed down at all even as flying is safer than ever and making more gains is more difficult. This is really impressive and important for people to take into account.”

Last year was one of the safest years on record for commercial air travel, with just two fatal air accidents in 12 months, compared to seven in 2022.

In both cases, a helicopter crashed on domestic flights, killing 86 people, less than half of the 178 deaths in 2022, according to a report by Dutch air safety organization To70.

No fatal aircraft accidents in 2023 involved international flights or commercial passenger aircraft.

The Daily Telegraph said more than 1,000 deaths each calendar year were “common” until about 15 years ago. In 2005 there were 1,056; The number for 1996 was 1,924.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, the average annual number of aviation fatalities has declined steadily since 1997, thanks in large part to the continued safety efforts of international aviation organizations.

What are your chances of dying in a plane crash?

Evidence shows that you are much more likely to die driving to the airport than in a fatal plane accident.

According to a 2017 Harvard University study, the odds of your plane crashing are one in 1.2 million, and the odds of dying from a plane crash are one in 11 million. Meanwhile, your chances of dying in a car accident are one in 5,000.

This means that a person could, on average, fly once a day for four million years before having a fatal accident.

Even if you are unlucky enough to get into a plane accident, you will likely survive it.

A NTSB review of national aviation accidents from 1983 to 1999 found that more than 95% of airline passengers survived accidents, including 55% in the most serious accidents, the BBC reported in 2018.

So there’s nothing to be afraid of then?

not exactly. Although there were only two fatal air accidents in 2023, air safety organization To70 noted a “worrying number of runway incursions”, where an aircraft entered the runway when it was occupied or when another aircraft was about to land. On January 2, five crew members of a Japan Coast Guard aircraft were killed when a Japan Airlines plane collided with their plane as it landed at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.

The To70 report also noted that aviation remains a “risk-laden industry” and said that with airports reaching pre-Covid traffic levels “a number of issues have not gone away”.

It noted with concern “the position of the Russian authorities” in response to the plane crash in which the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed.

She also said that the increasing focus on sustainable aviation, such as the use of new fuels, requires “vigilance” to ensure that developments in this area “do not have an impact on safety”.

Pilots with mental health issues and fatigue remain among the industry’s biggest safety concerns.

These concerns are shared by Ashley Nunes, who studies transportation safety and regulatory policy at MIT. “Limiting our perception of safety to fatal accidents alone narrows our assessment of risk,” he said in an article for the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail in 2018.

“Human errors that can jeopardize air safety continue to occur across the industry,” he wrote, citing a survey in which more than 95% of pilots admitted to landing their planes when conditions dictated they should not.

Nunes said the survey, in which 2,340 pilots worldwide participated, “paints a worrying picture about the current and future state of air safety.”

What is consensus?

Although there have been a number of headline-grabbing aviation disasters in recent years, the statistics are clear: flying is safer than ever. However, this does not mean that traveling by plane is completely risk-free.