Germanwings crash made you scared of flying? Don’t be

The crash in the Alps of the Germanwings Airbus A320, en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, follows a number of high profile crashes including Malaysia Airlines flights MH370 and MH17 last year and and Air France flight 447 in 2009, it’s easy to get the impression that flying is a dangerous form of transport.

Statistically you’ve got more chance of being hit by lightning than dying in a plane crash, and far more chance of being killed in a road traffic accident.

MH370 to Germanwings: a brutal year for aviation industry

The long-term trend also shows that air travel is becoming safer. Western Europe has some of the most crowded airspace in the world, yet the number fatal aviation accidents continues downwards, as does that of north America.

Figures from the International Air Transport Association show Europe’s rate last year was 0.15 jet aircraft for every one million flights, compared to an average of 0.24 per million from 2009 to 2013. And 2014 was the safest year on record for commercial jet travel, with an average of one accident for every 4.4 million flights.

Harro Ranter of industry watchdog, the Aviation Safety Network told the Wall St Journal that, with the vast increase in air travel from 1973 to 2013, if the accident rate had stayed the same, there would be a fatal air crash every 41 hours.

Ranter said: “Despite several high profile accidents in 2014 and this year, aviation still is extremely safe. Safer than it has ever been before. 2014 for example was the year with the lowest number of fatal airliner accidents ever. Given the fact that air travel has increased substantially over the years, this is quite remarkable.”

And in a factcheck last year for Channel 4 News, US statistics professor Arnold Barnett calculated that the chances of a passenger dying on a scheduled flight in the developed world was 1 in 14 million. This means you would have to take a flight every day for 38,000 years on average before you died in a crash.

Flying or driving?

That’s in contrast to driving. Road traffic charity RoadPeace says that in 2008, car crashes worldwide caused 1.4 million deaths. Also in 2008, the US National Safety Council estimated the lifetime risk of dying in a road traffic accident at one in 98. The odds of dying in the air were just one in 7,178.

The Aviation Safety Network found that there were 692 air fatalities in 2014, although this purely for accidents, so did not include the 298 killed when MH17 was shot down over Ukraine.

In the 1960s, when commercial jet travel first became popular, a passenger in the developed world had a one in 500,000 chance of being killed. That fell to one in 2 million by the end of the 1970s. By the 1980s that number was one in 4 million. From 2000-08 it was as low as one in 20 million.

This does depend where you fly. A study in 2009 found that in the developed world the risk of death per flight was one in 14 million, falling to one in 2 million in countries such as Brazil and China. Even in the poorest countries, the risk was just one in 800,000.

In other words, you should be much more worried about crashing while you drive to the airport than when you’re actually on the plane.

As Tony Tyler of the International Air Transport Association said last year: “Getting on an aircraft is still among the safest activities that one can do.”