The truth about flight safety

To add to their anxiety is the reality that more travelers have perished in plane crashes over the past week than did during all of 2013, according to a report by NBC News.

Despite that, air travel remains one of the safest forms of travel, so there’s little reason for consumers to ground their trips, according to experts. NBC quoted 11 incidents this year which have resulted in 644 fatalities, according to Aviation Safety Network data on commercial flights carrying more than 14 passengers. Chief among them was last week’s Malaysia Airlines MH17 crash, which killed 298 people. On Wednesday, 47 travelers died when TransAsia Airways flight 222 crashed. That tally makes 2014 the deadliest year since 2010, when there were 32 crashes resulting in 943 casualties, and well above the 10-year average of 376 fatalities. These figures did not include the latest crash of Air Algerie’s Flight AH5017 which crashed in the Mali desert on an Algiers-bound route, with 110 passengers and six crew member aboard.

But despite 2014’s high casualty totals, there isn’t a pattern in the recent incidents that shows a safety issue in common for travelers to worry about, said Harro Ranter, president of Aviation Safety Network. “When we look at the number of fatal accidents that we’ve had this year, there’s no apparent reason for concern. Especially the last couple of years, both in terms of the number of accidents and the number of fatalities, were among the safest in airline history.”

By the numbers, travelers face long odds on being in a fatal crash. Flying on one of the world’s major airlines, on any single flight, you have a 1 in 4.7 million chance of being killed, according to PlaneCrashInfo.com, which tracked accident data from 1993 to 2012. Even if you’re flying on one of those with the worst safety records, your odds are still 1 in 2 million.

Over a lifetime, the chance of dying in an “air and space transport incident,” as the National Safety Council describes it, are 1 in 8,357. To put that in perspective, by their data from 2010, you’re more likely to die from other less-expected causes including heat exposure (1:8,321), choking (1:3,649), in an accident as a pedestrian (1:723), a fall (1:152) or unintentional poisoning (1:119). Of course, causes such as heart disease, cancer and car accidents are also substantially more likely to occur.

“The most dangerous part of your airline flight is the trip to the airport,” said aviation and national security expert Carl Rochelle.