Boeing announced its third-quarter results on Wednesday, with a net loss of more than $6 billion. The aircraft maker has been in trouble since the beginning of the year, starting with safety concerns when a Boeing 737 Max jet full of passengers lost a panel in flight.
Despite this and a series of subsequent safety claims, a new analysis by MIT researchers shows that commercial flight is safer than ever. Since 1968, the global risk of death per flight has fallen by about half every decade, according to Arnold Barnett, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jan Reig Thora, a former graduate student. From 1968 to 1977, the chance of death was 1 in 350,000, but that probability has decreased. From 2018 to 2022, this will increase to 1 in 13.7 million passengers. But the study noted that throughout the major years of the pandemic, thousands of deaths are estimated to have been directly or indirectly related to coronavirus infections on passenger planes.
Researchers also found that flying is safer in some parts of the world than in others, although the risk is still low. Countries were classified into three tiers based on their commercial aviation safety records. The first and most secure tier included the United States, the United Kingdom, and European Union countries, as well as several countries such as Australia, China, Japan, and New Zealand. Meanwhile, the second tier includes Brazil, India, Malaysia, South Korea, Türkiye, and the United Arab Emirates. The risk of death for these two groups was calculated to be approximately 1 person per 80 million air travel from 2018 to 2022. According to the report, from 2018 to 2022, the death rate in tier 3 countries was 36.5 times higher than in tier 1 countries.
