How dangerous was flying this year?
The Washington Post says
With yet another airliner gone missing over Southeast Asian airspace, there’s no question that 2014 has been a year beset by mysterious air tragedies. But there’s a surprising fact hiding behind this year’s high-profile air tragedies: 2014 has been the safest year for flying since, well, ever.
When you look at their data, the claim is true if you are an aeroplane. If you are a passenger, the claim is false.
That is, 2014 (so far) has had 20 crashes by commercial flights carrying 14 or more passengers. That’s the lowest on record.
On the other hand, there have been 1007 fatalities in crashes of commercial flights carrying 14 or more passengers, which is about four times the number in 2013. You have to go back to the 1990s before 1000 deaths in a year becomes normal.
What has been unusual this year is that big planes have crashed. The missing AirAsia flight is an A320, the two Malaysia Airlines planes were 777s, the Air Algérie plane was an MD-83.
So is flying more dangerous? It’s hard to say. The trend over the past decade is still downwards, and the two Malaysia Airlines flights probably don’t indicate a pattern that applies to other airlines (even if it might make one nervous about that airline). It’s too soon to say for the Air Asia flight.
The absolute risk was still extremely low: in 2013 there were 3 billion air passenger departures, so 1000 deaths would be one in three million.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Seems to me that as a passenger 2014 was a safer year for me as well as the aeroplane. Only 20 flights crashed so when I booked a flight I was pretty safe.
On the other hand, noone books a flight – they book a destination and the airline chooses an aeroplane. So you are more likely to end up on an aeroplane with a higher number of passengers. And in 2014 these had a bad year.
So the safest way to travel in 2014 was to book a flight at random and hope it was going to your destination.
10 years ago