The first controlled flight of a heavier-than-air machine was achieved by the Wright brothers on Dec 17th, 1903 at Kitty Hawk, NC. That flight had one pilot, zero passengers, zero cabin crew, zero in-flight entertainment, reached an altitude of 10 feet above ground level and covered 120 feet in 10 seconds.
Now we routinely pack hundreds of people into large jetliners that fly between continents, measure distances covered in thousands of miles, altitude in tens of thousands of feet above sea level and time traveled in many hours. It is estimated that in 2021, commercial carriers flew over 7 billion miles (likely translating to trillions of passenger-miles given the passenger volume).
TL;DR
Commercial plane crashes are exceptionally rare, with a fatal accident rate of 0.39 per million flights in 2024. Globally, airlines operated 40.6 million flights, carried 5 billion passengers, and accumulated trillions of passenger-miles, with only 46 accidents and 251 fatalities. In the U.S., commercial aviation is even safer, with zero fatalities in many recent years and a fatality rate of 0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles. These figures underscore why flying remains the safest mode of long-distance travel, with odds of dying in a crash lower than winning a Powerball jackpot. Continue reading “Air travel is incredibly safe”
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