Flying is the safest way to travel. Here's how it got the distinction. | Cruising Altitude
Flying remains the safest mode of transportation in the U.S., and it’s not even close based on data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. It’s something I write and talk about all the time as an aviation reporter, but what does that actually mean? How and why is flying so safe? And how does it compare to other modes of transportation?
It turns out a lot of people have these questions. “Is flying safe?” is routinely one of the most searched travel-related questions.
Rest assured, it is. But read on if you want to hear about exactly how safe it is and how the aviation industry made it so.
Is flying safe?
Yes, extremely. Especially on U.S. commercial airlines.
In the 2024 Transportation Statistics Report from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, air travel is identified as the absolute safest form of transportation.
“Transportation incidents for all modes claimed 44,546 lives in 2022, of which all but 2,032 involved highway motor vehicles. Preliminary estimates for 2023 suggest a further decline in fatalities,” the report says. “There were no deaths from crashes on large commercial airlines in 2023, but several hundred deaths occurred in crashes in general aviation, commuter air, and air taxi services.”
The safety record is a little spottier abroad, but most common destinations for U.S. travelers, like western Europe, southeast Asia, the Middle East and Oceania have similarly strong aviation safety records. According to the International Air Transport Association, worldwide in 2023 there was only one fatal commercial airliner crash, which resulted in 72 deaths. In the North America, Asia Pacific and Europe regions, the fatality rate for commercial flying was around 0.5 for every million flights, while in Latin America and the Caribbean it was 4.5 fatalities per million flights and in Africa it was about 11 fatalities per million flights in 2023, according to IATA.
Last week's Cruising Altitude: How major airlines recovered after a southern winter storm
How did flying get so safe?
The aviation industry is exceptionally good at learning from its errors and improving.
“One good thing that the aviation community does do is it really does learn from its past experiences and past accidents,” Jim Brauchle, an aviation attorney at Motley Rice, told me. “The FAA has implemented or tired to implement a lot of programs where, if you report safety issues, there’s no repercussions for things like that.”
The National Transportation Safety Board investigates every aviation accident in the U.S., and is a party to many investigations abroad as well, and the industry takes its safety recommendations seriously.
Throughout my years reporting on airlines, executives always emphasized to me that they compete with other carriers on amenities, schedules, prices and any other number of things, but never on safety. In that regard, airlines, manufacturers and other industry stakeholders cooperate on a common mission to make flying as safe as possible.
Brauchle said lawmakers and the Federal Aviation Administration also have a hand in keeping the industry on track for safety.
“Everything is pretty highly regulated,” he said. “With aircraft we have so many redundant systems. If you have a failure of something there’s usually a backup. Technology today has gotten so much better.”
What role do passengers play in airline safety?
While flying is extremely safe, it’s not totally without risk.
Especially as turbulence gets more frequent and intense, it’s more important than ever to observe the seatbelt sign and to listen to flight crews when they recommend staying buckled up even if the sign is off.
As I’ve written previously, that’s the easiest and best way to prevent some of the most common and hard-to-predict injuries in flying.
Flight attendants are there for your safety
Relatedly, it’s important to remember that flight attendants’ main job is to keep travelers safe – not to serve them drinks.
“Customer service was one day of training out of eight weeks,” Rich Henderson, one of the authors of the blog Two Guys on a Plane, previously told me. The rest was focused on safety drills and emergency responses.
How the flying can keep getting safer
While there hasn’t been a fatal incident at a major U.S. airline in a number of years, there have certainly been concerning close calls recently, including the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max that lost a piece of the fuselage mid-flight in early 2024 and a number of incidents where two planes got closer to each other than regulations supposedly allow.
Brauchle said many of these incidents come down to turnover in the aviation workforce.
“We’re seeing higher turnover not only in piloting, but also in maintenance, in air traffic control, manufacturing, it’s all across the board,” he said. Additionally, as onboard computers become more sophisticated, a new generation of pilots has come to rely more and more on their instruments, which is generally a safer way to fly, but can lead to confusion at times if something malfunctions.
“Some of us older aviators will say the younger pilots are losing what we would say are stick and rudder skills, that airmanship, and there’s an overreliance on computers,” Brauchle said.
Still, flying remains extremely safe, but industry watchers say it’s important to keep robust training and cooperation between stakeholders the norm to maintain its place as the gold-standard form of transportation from a safety standpoint.
Zach Wichter is a travel reporter and writes the Cruising Altitude column for USA TODAY. He is based in New York and you can reach him at zwichter@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Is flying safe? Yes, and here's why. | Cruising Altitude
