Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

by Vaclav Smil

In 2017, so far the safest year in commercial flying, domestic and international flights carried 4.1 billion people and logged 7.69 trillion passenger-kilometers, with only 50 fatalities. With the mean flight time at about 2.2 hours, this implies roughly 9 billion passenger-hours, and 5.6 × 10–9 fatalities per person per hour in the air. But how low is this risk? The obvious measuring stick is general mortality—the annual death rate per 1,000 people. In affluent nations that rate now ranges between 7 and 11; I will use 9 as the mean. Because the year has 8,760 hours, this average mortality prorates to 0.000001 or 1 × 10–6 deaths per person per hour of living. This means that the average additional chance of dying while flying is just 5/1,000th of the risk of simply being alive. Smoking risks are 100 times as high; ditto for driving in a car. In short, flying has never been safer.