Keep on flying [Numbers Don't Lie

Abstract

YOU MIGHT THINK 2014 WAS A BAD YEAR FOR FLYING. There were four highly publicized accidents–the still-mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March, the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in July, AirAsia Flight QZ8501 falling into the Java Sea in December, and finally, in July, the Air Algerie Flight 5017 crash in Mali, for a total of 815 dead. · But according to Ascend, the consulting branch of Flightglobal that monitors aircraft accidents, 2014 in fact had the best accident rate in history: one fatality per 2.38 million flights, compared to the previous best of one per 2.37 million in 2012. True, Ascend did not count the downing of MH Flight 17, which was an act of war, not an accident. · In any case, it's better to personalize the problem by putting it in terms of the risk per passenger per hour of flight. The necessary data are in the annual safety report by the International Civil Aviation Organization, which covers large jetliners as well as smaller commuter planes. · In 2013, 32.1 million domestic and international flights carried 3.1 billion people, logged 5.8 trillion passenger-kilometers, and experienced 90 accidents, causing 173 fatalities. With the mean flight time at about 2.2 hours, this implies roughly 6.8 billion of passenger-hours or 2.5 × 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-8</sup> fatalities per person per hour in the air. For large jetliners—dominated by Airbuses and Boeings and regional jets made by Canada's Bombardier and Brazil's Embraer–the risk that year was just 1 × 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-8</sup> . In 2014, large jetliner accidents (excluding the MH17) would have pushed the latter rate to about 8 × 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-8</sup> , but the mean for the past decade remains at historic lows.