On Jan. 2, there was a frightful collision at Tokyo’s Haneda airport between a Japan Airlines Airbus A350 that was landing with 379 people aboard and a small Bombardier-built coast guard plane that was preparing to take off to deliver aid to victims of the New Year’s Day earthquake in central Japan. The Airbus collided with the Bombardier, turning both into fireballs. Five of the six people on the little coast guard plane died in the inferno, but everyone on the burning airliner evacuated safely.
Two commercial airliners were involved in ghastly accidents in the past two weeks, so maybe this isn’t the best time to point out that flying today is, by a considerable margin, less dangerous than ever.
Advertisement
Three days later, just after an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet took off from Portland, Ore., an emergency exit door plug — a piece of the fuselage that fills the space where an exit could have been installed — blew off after the plane’s ascent to nearly 16,000 feet. With a huge hole in the side of the aircraft, the cabin instantly depressurized. In that terrifying instant, a bunch of passenger items — cellphones, a teddy bear, even the shirt a teenager was wearing — were sucked right out of the plane. But the crew turned the plane around and returned to Portland with no loss of life or even serious injury. An investigation was launched, both Alaska Airlines and United Airlines grounded their Boeing 737 MAX jets, and it was soon discovered that a number of bolts were loose or missing, suggesting that Boeing has some serious internal negligence issues to confront.
Traumatic as those two accidents were, however, both could have been far more deadly — but weren’t. No one died on either of the two giant airliners. Despite the gaping hole that ripped open her aircraft 3 miles above the ground, the Alaska pilot not only kept the plane under control, she landed it safely.
Advertisement
“Ironically,” observes airline pilot Patrick Smith, who writes “Ask the Pilot,” a superb blog about airplanes and air travel, the coverage of the Boeing incident “serves to remind us of just how safe flying has become. In decades past, multiple airline crashes were the norm every year, with hundreds dead at a time. We’ve grown so accustomed to near-perfect safety that a minor event, without a single injury, wins as much attention in 2024 as a crash that killed two hundred people would’ve gotten in the 1980s.”
In a 2020 study, researchers at MIT crunched the commercial airline fatality rate on a decade-by-decade basis from 1968 through 2017. In the 10 years ending in 2017, that rate was one death for every 7.9 million passenger boardings. In the previous decade (1998-2007), the fatality rate had been one death per 2.7 million passenger boardings — three times as risky. That in turn was much lower than the prior 10 years, 1988-1997, when airline passengers died at a rate of one for every 1.3 million boardings.
Going back further, the pattern is the same. The fatality risk on commercial flights was one per 750,000 during 1978-1987 and one per 350,000 during 1968-1977.
Advertisement
To put that in percentage terms, over a 50-year span, the risk of being killed in a plane accident plunged from 0.0003 percent to 0.0000001 percent. Getting on a plane is not only a safer way to travel than getting behind the wheel of a car, it is safer than any mode of travel. Economist and transportation scholar Ian Savage of Northwestern University calculated fatality rates (deaths per billion passenger miles) for motorcycles, cars and SUVs, ferries, commuter rail and Amtrak, urban mass transit, buses, and commercial airlines. Of them all, flying was the safest option and it wasn’t even close. For example, the risk of being killed in a train accident (0.43 deaths per billion passenger miles) was six times the risk of meeting death on a plane.
As Sorcha Bradley recently put it in The Week: “You are far more likely to die driving to the airport than you are to be involved in a deadly plane accident.”
How did flying become so secure? Through a continual focus on improving most aspects of aviation safety. Compared to 20 or 30 years ago, airplane infrastructure is far better engineered, pilots are much better trained, aviation software is incomparably more advanced, the investigation of accidents is markedly more sophisticated, and even weather forecasting is significantly more accurate. As long as human beings can err, accidents can still happen — and do, as the events of this month show. But it isn’t sheer luck that explains why the last time there was a fatal accident involving a US carrier was in February 2009 — nearly 15 years ago. Airline travel isn’t nearly as comfortable, pleasant, roomy, and civilized as it once was. But it is a lot safer. So much so that when a door-sized plug blew out of a packed plane 16,000 feet in the air, everyone on board lived to tell the tale.
Advertisement
This is an excerpt from Arguable, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Jeff Jacoby. Sign up to get Arguable in your inbox each week.
The safest way to travel
- Advertisment - 