Is flying safer than ever? Aviation experts say yes
- Recent aviation incidents have caused a spike in travel safety concerns
- DOT: Flying is safer than ever, safer than crossing a street/driving a car
- Expert: "When they [incidents] happen, they bring attention"
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(NewsNation) — Travelers have been on edge lately as questions swirl around airline safety, following several frightening incidents kicking off the new year. But experts say these are not enough to dethrone air travel as the safest method of traveling, statistically.
The first incident happened on Jan. 2 when a Japan Airlines flight collided with a Coast Guard aircraft, engulfing both airplanes in flames.
All occupants of the JAL’s Airbus A350-900 airliner safely evacuated in 18 minutes. The captain of the Coast Guard’s much smaller Bombardier Dash-8 escaped with burns but five crew members died.
Days later, an Alaska Airlines door plug blew off the plane midflight, forcing an emergency landing. The FAA launched an investigation into Boeing following the incident.
However, when looking at statistics from the last 30 years, flying has never been safer.
“Airplanes have gotten unbelievably safe, even though they didn’t start that way,” OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman said at a Wall Street Journal conference last year.
Nowadays, boarding a plane and flying to your next destination statistically is safer than walking across the street, driving a car, riding on a ferry or even riding a train, according to data from the Department of Transportation.
Aviation experts point to three main factors making flying safer than ever:
- More federal regulation
- The advancement in technology and engineering
- The FAA’s self-reporting programs encourage airline operators to come forward without fear of repercussions, which hasn’t always been the case.
“If you think about the thousands of flights that happen every single day without any problems that’s truly remarkable, and I think that’s why it brings so much attention to these events when they happen, because they’re so rare,” former airline pilot Dan Bubb said. “But when they happen, they bring attention.”
In 2022, there were only 20 accidents on U.S. Airlines out of roughly 8.4 million departures, resulting in one fatality, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
An “airline accident” means substantial damage or serious injury on a plane from gate to gate. So, overall, that number is low.
“We’ve had a number of wake-up calls in the industry recently. We have made commercial aviation ultra-safe. We’ve gone over a decade without a single crash in the United States, something I would not have thought possible 30 or 40 years ago,” Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III told USA Today.
Sullenberger landed an Airbus A320 in the Hudson River just off Manhattan 15 years ago in an event that is still remembered as the “Miracle on the Hudson.”
Aviation industry experts believe aircraft safety is only going to improve.
