Flying by plane is now safer than ever, according to a study

Hay one chance in 13.7 million of a passenger anywhere in the world dying on board an airplane, according to a new study. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States analyzed global passenger and fatality data between 2018 and 2022 and found that deaths on airplanes decreased by an average of 7% each year.

These results follow a pattern of “continuous improvement” which began in 1968, when the death rate fell by an average of 7.5% annually, even as air traffic increased.

The news comes at a time when the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing faces a series of technical problems that forced the company to leave on land the test flights of its 777-9 model. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) has also initiated inspections on the 787 Dreamliner due to failures in the movements of the pilot seats.

The mortality rate is 36% higher in some countries

The incident rate depends on the countries on the route. Researchers divide states into three risk levels: low, medium and high based on their aviation safety record.

He lowest risk is the Tier 1 group, which includes the European Union, Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Montenegro, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Some examples of countries in the group of level 2 They are Bahrain, Bosnia, Brazil, Brunei, Chile, Hong Kong, India, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

The rest of the countries in the world are in level 3 or group of high risk.

According to the study, in the first two levels the risk of death is one for every 80 million of boarded passengers. These countries represent more than half of the planet’s 8 billion inhabitants. “At that rate, a passenger could, on average, take a random plane a day for 220,000 years before becoming the victim of a fatal accident,” the report continues.

The risk of mortality is 36% higher in level 3 countriesbut the number of fatalities continues to decrease globally. “Although [estas naciones] continue to improve over time, the risk of death for their passengers remains many times greater than the risk elsewhere,” the study states.

The study also does not include fatal accidents that resulted from direct attacks to passengers, such as attacksuicide bomber at Kabul airport in 2021, which killed 170 Afghans and 13 US soldiers.

More than 4,000 deaths from contracting COVID-19 on a plane

The study takes into account the COVID-19 pandemicwhich they defined as the period between March 2020 and December 2022. Although there were fewer passengers during the pandemic, those who traveled faced a “new source of danger” if they were exposed to the virus on a flight.

During those months, airlines told passengers that COVID-19 transmission was “almost impossible“, according to the researchers in their study, despite the fact that the US Surgeon General (the US Government’s main spokesperson on health matters) estimated that in 96% of flights During that period there was at least one passenger positive.

Despite this new risk, the researchers say that “there is no evidence “Apart from onboard transmission of COVID-19, passenger safety improved notably,” the study states.

In total, the document estimates that about 4,760 people died from contracting a COVID-19 infection on a flight between March 2020 and December 2022, although MIT researchers admit that it is difficult to know the exact number of deaths, since passengers who contracted an infection after a flight could have infected others who could have died.

“These estimates of COVID-19 deaths are necessarily inaccurate“, the study states, “and although they use lower parameter estimates, they may be too high.”

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Their data also does not count passengers under 18 years of age and they don’t differentiate age of passengers over 65 years of age, which, according to researchers, is important because mortality increases considerably in the case of older people.