You'd think that you could just find out the numbers—the odds—and that would be it. The annual risk of being killed in a plane crash for the average American is about 1 in 11 million. On that basis, the risk looks pretty small. Compare that, for example, to the annual risk of being killed in a motor vehicle crash for the average American, which is about 1 in 5, But if you think about those numbers, problems crop up right away.
First of all, you are not the average American. Nobody is. Some people fly more and some fly less and some don't fly at all. So if you take the total number of people killed in commercial plane crashes and divide that into the total population, the result, the risk for the average American, may be a good general guide to whether the risk is big or small, but it's not specific to your personal risk.
Then there's another numbers problem: what denominator are you using? For the math-challenged, like me, that's the number at the bottom of a fraction. You can calculate the risk of flying by:. They all produce accurate numbers, but which one is most relevant to you depends on your personal flying patterns. Some fliers take lots of short flights and some take longer ones, for example.
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Corporate solution including all features. Statistics on " Air transportation worldwide " The most important statistics. The most important statistics. Further related statistics. Distribution of air traffic in Danish airspace Distribution of airlines in Danish airspace Size of airspace in Europe and the U. Further Content: You might find this interesting as well.
Perhaps you have occasionally taken the train for your travels, believing that it would be safer. Think again. Based on train accidents over the past twenty years, your chances of dying on a transcontinental train journey are one in a million. Those are great odds, mind you. But flying coast-to-coast is ten times safer than making the trip by train. How about driving , our typical form of transportation? There are approximately one hundred and thirty people killed daily in auto accidents.
In , five hundred million airline passengers were transported an average distance of eight hundred miles, through more than seven million takeoffs and landings, in all kinds of weather conditions, with a loss of only thirty-nine lives. A sold-out jet would have to crash every day of the week, with no survivors, to equal the highway deaths per year in this country. Barnett of MIT compared the chance of dying from an airline accident versus a driving accident, after accounting for the greater number of people who drive each day.
Can you guess what he found? You are nineteen times safer in a plane than in a car. Every single time you step on a plane, no matter how many times you fly, you are nineteen times less likely to die than in your car. The Airline Deregulation Act of permitted the airlines to be competitive both in the routes they flew and the fares they charged.
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