09 December 2024
Steady Improvement
The steady reduction in deaths associated with passenger flights has continued for decades, even at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, a report says.
Aviation passenger safety has improved dramatically and at a steady rate over the past five decades, with the risk of dying on a scheduled passenger flight declining about 50 per cent in each 10-year period, according to a study by U.S. researchers.
Focusing on the most recent five-year period from 2018 through 2022, the worldwide death risk per boarding was one in 13.7 million, according to the study by Arnold Barnett and Jan Reig Torra of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their report on the study was published in the August issue of the Journal of Air Transport Management.
The one in 13.7 million rates is 42 per cent lower than the 2008–2017 risk of one in 7.9 million. In comparison, the rate for 1998–2007 was one in 2.7 million; for 1988–1997, one in 1.3 million; for 1978–1987, one in 750,000; and for 1968–1977, 1 in 350,00.
Overall, since the 1960s, the global passenger death risk from accidents and deliberate acts has declined by 7 per cent each year, the report said, adding, “Even as the mortality risk of flying (passengers killed/passengers carried or, equivalently, death risk per boarding) declined, the annual percentage rate of decline did not fall.”
In other words, the death risk per boarding declined by a factor of two every decade, the report said. “This outcome is especially impressive because the lower [the] frequency of fatal accidents, the harder it would seem to continue to improve at the same rate.”
The COVID-19 impact
The trend continued through the period from 2018 through 2022, despite “the convulsions in air travel” associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the report said, noting that researchers considered that the pandemic affected 34 weeks during that period. A breakdown of data for 2018–2022 found the global death risk per board in the months before the COVID-19 outbreak (January 2018 through February 2020) was one in 11.1 million; during the pandemic (March 2020 through December 2022), the rate was one per 17 million.
“[T]he pandemic … caused no deviation from the trend under which global passenger death risk from accidents and deliberate acts dropped by about 7 per cent per year,” the report said.
The report added that, despite claims by some in the industry that COVID-19 transmission aboard aeroplanes was nearly impossible, the transmission on commercial flights may have resulted in thousands of deaths worldwide between March 2020 and December 2022. The report cited reports of several instances of COVID-19 transmission, including “an Irish flight in which COVID-19 among passengers caused 46 follow-up infections to people on the ground.”
The authors estimated there were 4,760 deaths worldwide associated with in-flight COVID-19 infections.
The estimate is imprecise, the report said, adding that it offers “serious evidence that on-board transmission of COVID-19 during the pandemic caused far more deaths over 2018–2022 [in countries considered to have low or intermediate death risk per boarding] than accidents or deliberate acts against aviation.”
Nevertheless, even though COVID-19 prompted a virtual shutdown of the industry, flights later resumed “at a shocking speed,” the report said. “Layoffs and retirements decimated many experienced workforces at airlines, and they were soon followed by the rushed hiring of new personnel. Against that backdrop, maintaining the level of passenger safety would be impressive, but sharply improving safety would seem astounding. And yet, outside of on-board transmission of COVID-19, passenger safety did improve sharply.”
The report also noted the substantial difference across nations in death risk per boarding data. The study placed nations in three groups according to risk, the passenger death risk in higher-risk nations is “more than an order of magnitude higher” than the risk in nations in the low-risk group or the intermediate-risk group.
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Author
Linda Werfelman
Flight Safety Foundation
First published in AeroSafety World 03 September 2024
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