CNN
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I admit it: when I fly on an airplane, I get some upset. Getting inside that metal tube is where I rediscovered prayer than anywhere else. I used to be so afraid of flying that I forced my dad to ride a train with me from New York City to Miami.
If you're like me, a horrifying crash involving a Wednesday night American Airlines plane and a US military helicopter that left 67 deaths, including 60 passengers, has rocked you to your core. In fact, according to experts interviewed by CNN's Marnie Hunter and Julia Buckley, clear improvements should be made to improve airline safety.
But you and I really shouldn't think about future flights again. Flying on a US commercial airline is one of the safest things you can do and will be extremely safe over the past 40 years.
This clearly does nothing to take away from Wednesday's heartache, but it provides the fearsome flyer's security.
I'm a statistical guy at the end of the day, and what stands out statistically about Wednesday's tragedy is that it was the first major crash since 2009.
Between 2010 and 2024, two passengers from a scheduled service on a US commercial airline were killed. This was the lowest number on record in the mid-20th century and 15 years.
Even considering the crash on Wednesday, the 2011-2025 period saw fewer passenger deaths than the 15 years before the 2010s.
And that safety period is part of a decades-long trend to increase US safety.
According to the National Transportation Safety Board, 706 passengers were killed on a US commercial airline from 2000 to 2009, including 245 passengers who died on 9/11. That 706 numbers are more than 11 times the number of times in the past 15 years.
This 706 figure has declined since the 1990s. In the 90s, 784 passengers were killed on a US commercial airliner.
Surprisingly, the 784 figure is lower than last year. During the eight-year stretch from 1982 to 1989, 984 passengers scheduled for a US commercial airliner were killed. Including chartered or non-regular flights, the number jumps north of 1,400.
(Note that many passengers were killed in the 1980s in the bombing, including the 243 people who died in the infamous Pan AM 103 “Lockerbee Bombing” in 1988.)
Currently, higher than zero is too much to die on an airplane, but the number of passengers killed on US commercial airlines in the past 15 years (62) is around 1/16. The 1980s.
The reduction in passenger deaths is even more prominent considering more people are flying. For example, in 2019, over 900 million people boarded US commercial airlines. In 1982, fewer than 300 million people boarded commercial passenger aircraft.
Combining the fact that passengers are increasing and deaths are low, we see a possibility that passengers could die on a commercial US airliner 40 years ago is less than a 45th of a chance of passengers dying.
As my colleague Hunter and Buckley stated, “It's far more likely to be killed by a shark attack, or a much more likely to lay a quadruplet than you die in a plane crash. ”.
And there are similar trends all over the world. Hunter and Buckley, cited from MIT, said, “We are now only about 1/38th in the odds of death in plane crashes compared to levels in the late 1960s and 1970s.” I discovered that.
But it's not just the number of deaths that's falling, but the number of massive, fatal crashes that have fallen.
Among the US commercial airlines, five airline crashes were found between 1982 and 1989 with over 100 deaths. There were four in the 1990s. There was one in the 2000s, and it was over 23 years ago (November 2001).
Using different thresholds, there were 19 different incidents with passenger deaths scheduled for airlines from 1982 to 1989, with 14 in the 1990s and 11 (9/) from 2000 to 2009. 7), including 11, there have been three different incidents from 2010 to the present.
Perhaps the best way to put this in perspective is to compare flying on a plane to driving a car. After all, that's what many of us do every day. What's more, if you didn't travel by plane, it's a way for many of us to travel long distances.
To do this, you can turn to my colleague Chris Isidor, who wrote a lot about airline safety. One of my favorite quotes from an article he wrote last year came from Anthony Brickhouse, a crash investigator and professor of aviation safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
Brickhouse said, “When you arrive at the airport and step into a pressurized tube, that's the safest part of your trip… you've increased the risk of driving to the airport.”
In recent memory, judging by the death rate per 100 million miles, the risk of flying by plane never came near the risk of traveling by car in the US. In most cases, airline prices are well below 1/10th of the level of ground vehicles.
None of these statistics means that airlines cannot be safer. We have to do it.
What these statistics mean is that I will continue to ride a commercial jet.
It just keeps repeating the odds to myself when I do – and over and over.
