“At this point, we don’t believe there are any survivors from this accident…”
The announcement on Thursday from Washington D.C. Fire and EMS Chief John Donnelly was crushing. An American Airlines regional jet and a military Black Hawk helicopter had collided midair on Wednesday night and both aircraft plummeted into the freezing, pitch-black Potomac River. With the light of day, rescuers could tell all hope was lost.
The catastrophe claimed 64 lives on board the Bombardier jet and three on the Black Hawk. It was the first commercial air disaster since February 2009 when a Colgan Air DHC-8 propeller plane, flying for Continental, crashed into a house in Buffalo, New York, killing 50 people, including one on the ground. And the D.C. tragedy was the worst loss of life in U.S. commercial air travel since November 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into Belle Harbor, Queens, after taking off from JFK Airport, New York, claiming 265 lives.
While these calamities are devastating and there are too many close calls every week between commercial airliners, the reality of air travel today tells a different story: flying has never been safer.
Commercial planes carry more than 850 million passengers per year in the U.S. and more than 9.6 billion globally, and there are lots of ways to measure safety including deaths per billion miles and fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours.
But the simplest and clearest air safety statistic measures your likelihood of dying on your next flight.
According to the most recent data, your chances of perishing on your next flight anywhere in the world are one in 24.8 million, according to Arnold Barnett of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and the world’s foremost authority on plane crash data. That’s one fatality for every 24.8 million so-called passenger boardings or trips.
In other words, you could take a commercial flight every day for the next 68,000 years before you would experience a fatal accident. (Those are around the same odds as flipping a coin and getting heads between 24 to 25 times in a row).
Over the last 50 years, the risk of dying while flying has dropped almost two-fold every decade, according to Barnett’s most recent study. Between 1968 and 1977, the chances were one in 350,000; from 1978 to 1987, the odds were one in 750,000. By 2007 to 2017, the odds were 1 in 7.9 million; and between 2018 to 2022, the odds were one in 13.7 million. Today’s passengers are about 39 times safer than those in the late 1960s and 1970s.
“Aviation safety continues to get better,” 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 7 percent annually, and continues to go down by a factor of two every decade.”
This improvement is no accident. Advancements in technology, stricter regulations, and better pilot training have all played important roles. Modern aircraft boast cutting-edge navigation and communication systems, slashing the chances of mishaps due to human error or technical glitches. Global aviation authorities have also tightened safety protocols, ensuring airlines operate at higher standards.
But after decades of progress, 2024 complicated the story. The Aviation Safety Network reported 318 fatalities from aircraft accidents last year, marking the deadliest since 2018. Notable tragedies included Jeju Air Flight 2216 in South Korea in December 2024, which resulted in 179 deaths, and Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 in Kazakhstan also in December 2024, claiming 38 lives—but which was caused by a Russian missile.
Barnett acknowledged that the recent cluster of deadly plane crashes creates anxiety. “The fact that three major crashes occurred in about a month starting around Christmas 2024 may have unnerved some people, but it is simply a coincidence,” he wrote in an email to the Beast.
The MIT study showed that it is safest to fly in countries like the U.S., Canada, European countries, Israel, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, with a death risk per boarding of about 1 in 80 million between 2018 and 2022. A bottom tier of countries, including Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, Vietnam and Indonesia had 36.5 times more fatalities per passenger boarding than top-tier countries.
Still, Barnett stresses that even those countries are making progress. Fatalities per boarding dropped in half during the 2018-2022 period.
In the end, while the D.C. disaster leaves many questions to answer, we are safer than ever in the air, experts say. And, in the U.S., flying has been the safest form of transportation over time.
Statistics will never ease the pain of loss or relieve someone who is afraid of flying. But for those thinking about their next trip, the chances of perishing are one in 24.8 million.
The odds of being struck by lightning in any one year for Americans: one in 1.2 million. The annual risk of dying from a dog attack: one in 54,000.
And lifetime risk of dying in a car crash: One in 95.
Ben Sherwood, publisher and CEO of the Daily Beast, has written extensively about survival and has attended the FAA’s airplane crash survival school in Oklahoma City and the Navy’s Aviation Survival Training School in Miramar, California.
