How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

by Vaclav Smil

Scheduled commercial flights, already a very low-risk activity at the end of the last century, got appreciably safer during the first two decades of the 21st century. This conclusion stands despite some disturbing recent losses, including the still-unsolved (and likely never to be explained) disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 somewhere over the Indian Ocean in March 2014, followed by the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, and the two crashes of the new Boeing 737 MAX—Lion Air flight 610 in the Java Sea (October 29, 2018) and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 near Addis Ababa (March 10, 2019).53 Perhaps the most revealing way to compare the airline industry’s fatalities is per 100 billion passenger-kilometers flown. This rate was 14.3 in 2010, it reached a record low of 0.65 in 2017, but it increased to 2.75 in 2019. Flying in 2019 was thus more than five times safer than in 2010, and more than 200 times safer than at the beginning of the jetliner era in the late 1950s.54 Expressing these fatalities in terms of risks per hour of exposure is fairly straightforward. The mean 2015–2019 total of accidental deaths was 292; the averages of 68 trillion passenger-kilometers flown and 4.2 billion passengers mean that average passengers flew about 1,900 kilometers and spent about 2.5 hours in flight; the total of about 10.5 billion passenger-hours spent aloft and 292 fatalities translates to 2.8 × 10-8 (0.000000028) fatalities per person ...