Flying Is Safer Than Eating
By Timothy Sandefur
The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) decision to ground Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 passenger jet in the wake of two crashes has raised questions about the safety of today’s airplane technology and led to some exaggerated reactions. “Can pilots trust Boeing with any of its other s?” demanded one retired pilot on CNN. A more balanced assessment was offered by Atlantic journalist James Fallows. “The astonishingly good safety record of the world’s commercial air-travel system,” he suggests, “has earned most of the system’s members the benefit of the doubt on safety judgments.” Quoting another pilot, Fallows concludes that “airline accidents have become so rare I’m not sure what is still acceptable to the flying public.”
The safety of modern airline travel is indeed a wonder. For the near-decade between February 2009 and April 2018, there wasn’t a single fatality on a commercial flight in the United States. Considering that during that time, Americans flew something on the order of sixty million miles per month—akin to flying to the moon and back every day for four years—that’s an astonishing degree of safety. . . .
It’s a cliché that driving to the airport is more dangerous than flying, but putting it that way may even _over_state the risk of plane travel. A 2006 report calculated the odds of dying in a crash at one in eleven million—and that was before the decade-long zero-fatalities streak. Driving is vastly more dangerous. In 2017, Americans drove more than three billion miles at the cost of 37,133 lives. In the entire decade before that, American air carriers suffered sixty-seven fatalities (none in the United States) while flying 7.8 billion miles worldwide. According to other sources, seven people die for every billion miles traveled by car, whereas for plane travel, that figure is 0.07. That’s such a tiny number that it’s little exaggeration to say that flying is safer than doing anything else. Hiking, biking, and eating are literally thousands of times more deadly.