That flight travel is one of the safer modes of transportation is a foregone conclusion. Yet, there seems to be some confusion about the risk of taking flights versus, say, cars. Therefore the comparison requires a reevaluation.
The first question is: what is the right metric to use? Is it the number of fatalities per passenger boarding? Or is it the number of accidents/deaths per boarding? Yet another one is the number of accidents/deaths per passenger-kilometre travelled. Let’s make some (gu)estimates on each of these.
Available data
| Item | Data |
| # of flights | 40 mln (2019) |
| # aviation incidents | 125 (2019) |
| # fatal accidents | 8 (2019) |
| # aviation deaths | 575 (2019) |
| # passengers | 4500 mln (2019) |
| average trip length | 2000 km |
| passenger-km | 9000 bln (2019) |
Calculated quantities
| Metric | Data |
| Incidents per trip | 3.13 (per million trips) |
| Fatal incidents per trip | 0.2 (per million trips) |
| Fatality per trip | 14.4 (per million trips) |
| Fatality per passenger-km | 0.06 (per billion-km) |
| Fatality per passenger | 0.13 (per million passengers) |
Risk of air travel
In my option, the right metric is either the number of incidents per trip or the number of fatal incidents per trip. And probably the difference between road vs air. In air travel, the distance covered or the number of hours in the air are not the prime variable for incidents; riskier parts of a flight are the takeoff and landing, each of which happens once every trip, however brief or lengthy the travel be.
Comparison with the road
So how does it compare with road travel? That is a bit more complex as the data are hard to come by, requiring a lot of assumptions. Also, the risk of road travel has not distributed the way it is for the air. We’ll visit those in another post.
References
[1] http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Reports/probability.html
[2] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/india-tops-the-world-with-11-of-global-death-in-road-accidents-world-bank-report/articleshow/80906857.cms
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_incidents
[4] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries
[5] https://www.icao.int/annual-report-2019/Pages/the-world-of-air-transport-in-2019.aspx
[6] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety
[8] https://accidentstats.airbus.com/statistics/fatal-accidents
[9] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/
[10] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200124124510.htm
