Aviation Safety: A Whole New World?

In 2017, over four billion passengers worldwide embarked on air journeys on scheduled flights. Only eight of them were killed in air accidents. Viewed in isolation, this outcome would suggest that the events that produce aviation deaths are on the verge of extinction throughout the world. However, given the rarity of air disasters, year-to-year passenger death tolls are subject to considerable volatility. Here, we examine worldwide data about fatal aviation events on scheduled passenger flights for the decade 2008–2017 in conjunction with similar data for earlier decades. A major difference between this safety study and others is that we work with probabilistic models customized to aviation safety data, with the aim of distinguishing meaningful patterns from random fluctuations. We show that death risk per boarding over 2008–2017 fell by more than half compared with the previous decade, whereas the world’s nations continued to fall into three highly divergent risk categories. Major new developments in recent years include exceptionally strong safety achievements in China—which is slated to be the world’s largest aviation nation within five years—and the Eastern European members of the European Union—which had a fatality-free record in the last decade that constituted the Union’s strongest performance. A troubling aspect of the findings is that the less developed nations did not gain in aviation safety relative to other countries, despite having considerably more room for improvement.