A research article published in the Journal of Air Transport Management presented the results of the analysis conducted by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) regarding the mortality risk associated with commercial air travel per passenger boarding.
The findings indicate that contemporary flights are approximately 39 times safer compared to the early days of mass air travel in the late 1960s.
The safety of air travel has improved markedly since the inception of large-scale commercial aviation, the MIT analysts say, with the likelihood of a fatality occurring in commercial air travel being one in every 350,000 passenger boardings worldwide during the period of 1968 to 1977, while in contrast, this risk significantly decreased to one in 13,700,000 boardings between 2018 and 2022.
Using the data from the Flight Safety Foundation, the World Bank, and the International Air Transport Association (IATA), MIT researchers have likened the trend in aviation safety to “an aerial interpretation of Moore’s Law,” a forecast made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, which posits that the processing capability of microchips would approximately double every 18 months. In light of this analogy, they have projected that civil aviation has approximately doubled in safety every decade since the late 1960s.
According to MIT professor Arnold Barnett, a prominent authority on aviation safety and co-author of the study, aviation safety is consistently improving. One might assume that there exists a minimum level of risk that cannot be reduced further. However, the likelihood of fatality during air travel decreases by approximately 7% each year, and this figure continues to halve every ten years.
However, the research did not explore the underlying causes of the trend. Barnett suggests that multiple factors play a role in enhancing aviation safety. Key contributors include technological innovations like collision avoidance systems in aircraft, advancements in crew training, and the efforts of aviation regulatory bodies and safety organizations.
MIT analysts have cautioned that although there have been general advancements in the safety of air travel, certain regions of the world continue to pose greater risks for commercial aviation. Specifically, during the period from 2018 to 2022, the United States, the majority of Europe, Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, and New Zealand experienced a fatality rate per passenger boarding that was 36.5 times lower than that of many nations in the Middle East, South America, and South Africa, in addition to South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey.
