With everything that's been in the news lately you'd be forgiven for thinking that flying in a plane has become somewhat more risky. Boeing continues to front hearings after a door blew off an Air Alaska flight earlier this year, there have been scenes of severe turbulence causing injury and death, planes being struck by lighting and a host of other incidents making news headlines. But despite all this, a new MIT study has revealed plane travel has been getting safer every decade.
READ MORE: Eurostar train from London to Paris: Everything to know Specifically, commercial flight has become roughly twice as safe each decade since the 1960s, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology study published in the journal Journal of Air Transport Management. The study did include analysis of the risk of COVID-19, but quantified it separately from the long-term safety trend, which is based on accidents and deliberate attacks on aviation. READ MORE: Everything to know before you visit China The data shows flyers are 39 times safer than half a century ago when one in 350,000 passengers had a risk of death in the air.
From 1978 to 1987 that number grew to one in 750,000 and one in 1.3 million from 1988 to 1997. One in 2.
7 million were at risk from 1998 to 2007, then one in 7.9 million in 2007 to 2017. Over time it has drastically slumped to one in 13.
7 million travellers from 2018 to 2022. By comparison, the odds of dying in a crash are just one in 93 and the odds of dying of heart disease are one in six, according to Forbes. Even the chances of being attacked and killed by a shark are higher, one in 3.
75 million. READ MORE: The hotspot dupes in Paris that are way less crowded "Aviation safety continues to get better," professor and study author Arnold Barnett said. "You might think there is some irreducible risk level we can't get below, and yet, the chance of dying during an air journey keeps dropping by about seven per cent annually, and continues to go down by a factor of two every decade.
" "After decades of sharp improvements, it's really hard to keep improving at the same rate. And yet they do," Barnett said..
