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Flight Safety Statistics

2 min read

The short answer

Flying is the safest way to travel long distances. More than 99.99999% of passenger boardings end safely, and flying keeps getting safer every decade. Mile for mile, it's about 100 times safer than travelling by car.

The Numbers at a Glance

Fear often lives in the gap between how risky something feels and how risky it really is. For flying, that gap is huge.

  • More than 99.99999% of passenger boardings worldwide ended safely in 2018–2022, according to a 2024 MIT study. In the US, Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan and similar countries, the record is about six times better still.
  • More than 100,000 airline flights take off and land safely every day. That's about 38.7 million in 2025 alone. Almost 5 billion passengers flew in 2024.
  • In 2025, only 51 of those 38.7 million flights had a reportable safety event of any kind. That's about one in every 759,000 flights, and the rate keeps falling.
  • Flying has become roughly twice as safe every decade since the late 1960s.

A Milestone Worth Knowing

In 2025, there wasn't a single serious event worldwide caused by a plane losing control in flight. That was once the most common cause of serious events. A whole year with none has happened only twice: in 2020 and in 2025. It reflects decades of better training, more realistic simulators and smarter planes. The industry keeps narrowing the gap between where safety is and where it wants to be.

Compared With Other Travel

  • Mile for mile, flying is roughly 100 times safer than travelling by car.
  • The drive to the airport carries more risk than the flight itself.

Why Flying Is So Safe

It isn't luck. It comes from:

  1. Backups for everything — every important system has a spare, and often a spare for the spare.
  2. Learning from everything — every problem, however small, is studied and the lessons are shared across the industry.
  3. Strict rules — authorities worldwide set tough standards for design, maintenance and operations.
  4. Constant training — pilots practise rare situations throughout their careers.
  5. Open reporting — people are encouraged to report concerns, and honest mistakes aren't punished.

Why It Still Feels Risky

Our brains judge risk by how easily we can picture something. Rare aviation stories get huge news coverage, so they stick in our minds. Everyday road incidents, which are far more common, rarely make the news.

Psychologists call this the availability bias. We overestimate risks we can easily picture, and underestimate familiar, everyday ones.

Still Getting Safer

Better planes, materials, weather forecasting, navigation and training mean each decade is safer than the last. The industry's goal is to push risk ever closer to zero.

The Bottom Line

By almost any measure, flying is the safest way to travel long distances. Every time you board, you're choosing the safest option available.

Sources

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