Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Air travel continues to get safer, according to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of ...
[+] Technology. getty Fear of flying is fairly common—as many as 40% of people experience it, according to frequently cited research in Frontiers in Psychology . Viral TikTok videos of extreme turbulence, the January mid-air Boeing door plug blowout incident on an Alaskan Airlines flight, near collisions on runways, as well as headlines about the recent fatal crash outside of São Paulo Brazil can, of course, heighten aviophobia (or the fear of flying) among travelers.
But how safe is it to travel on a plane? A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say that worldwide plane travel continues to get safer, and the risk of dying from commercial air travel is 1 per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally in the 2018 to 2022 period. The fatality risk is down from 1 per 7.
9 million boardings in 2008-2017 and a major decrease from the 1 per every 350,000 boardings in 1968 to 1977, according to the new paper that was published this month in Journal of Air Transport Management . “You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can’t get below,” said Arnold Barnett, a leading expert in air travel safety and operations and the co-author of the research. “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 .