The Sky is Falling - How Safe is Flying in the US Versus Overseas?
Two plane crashes in 48 hours. How safe is flying? What you need to know.
Both crashes underscore one of the fundamental facts about aviation safety: Your safety depends largely where you're flying. In other words, commercial jet travel in the domestic United States is safer than most places on earth, especially the developing world.
Arnold Barnett is a professor at MIT and leading authority on aviation safety. To get to the bottom line for those afraid of flying, he created a statistic known as Q. It measures your risk of death on your next flight. (Barnett, it should be noted, is afraid of flying.)
Despite the latest crashes, Barnett says, commercial jet travel is actually getting safer. For the purposes of understanding risks, he divides the world and its airline carriers into different categories.
For instance, he argues, your risk of dying on your next domestic jet flight in the United Sates is one in 60 million (based on data from 2000 to 2009). In other words, you could fly every day for the next 164,000 years on average before you would perish in a crash.
By comparison, if you fly domestically by jet in the rest of the industrialized world (say, Europe), your chances of dying are slightly worse: One in 30 million. Barnett notes that the difference with the US is "statistically unreliable" given that both risk numbers are based on "exceedingly few fatal events." Despite the crashes in Iran and Lebanon, the one-in-30-million risk doesn't change because Barnett says those airlines aren't First-World carriers.
If you travel between countries on First World carriers, your risk of dying increases. In this case, Barnett says, your Q is about one in 10 million. And if you fly on Third-World or former Soviet bloc air carriers, your risk of dying is about one in 2 million.
In short, if you fly in the United States or the major industrialized nations on First World air carriers, your chances of perishing are incredibly slim. If you fly outside the US on non-First World carriers, your chances are still extremely small, but not as negligible.
