Anxious airline flyers may well remember 2024 as the year their worst fears about the safety of air travel felt confirmed, as a series of unprecedented, and in some cases fatal, airplane incidents captured headlines.
Three separate incidents last week — aboard South Korean, Canadian and Azerbaijani airliners — have stirred those anxieties during the busy holiday travel period. But statistics show the risk of death or injury on a commercial flight is extremely low.
The latest incident happened Sunday in South Korea when a Boeing passenger jet crash-landed at Muan International Airport, killing 179 people — the deadliest aviation disaster in the country since 1997. In footage broadcast by multiple South Korean news outlets, the Jeju Air flight can be seen skidding on its belly at high speed, hitting an embankment and erupting in a fireball.
It’s still unclear what caused the crash, though experts told CNN the plane’s undercarriage — specifically, the wheels used for takeoff and landing — appeared not to have fully deployed before hitting the tarmac. South Korean authorities are probing the cause of the disaster with the help of investigators from the United States.
In a Sunday statement on X, Boeing extended its “deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones” and said it was ready to support Jeju Air.
The crash came after 38 people were killed on Christmas Day when an Azerbaijan Airlines flight crashed after entering Russian airspace in Grozny, Chechnya. It is unconfirmed what was behind the incident, but Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has accused Russia of accidentally shooting down the airliner.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “apologized for the fact that the tragic incident occurred in Russian airspace” in a phone call with Aliyev last week, according to a statement from the Kremlin, but did not claim responsibility.
And, on Saturday night, an Air Canada Express flight reported a non-fatal accident. The flight, operated by partner PAL Airlines and carrying 73 passengers, “experienced a suspected landing gear issue” after arriving at Halifax Stanfield International Airport in Nova Scotia, though no injuries were reported, according to the airline.
These incidents closed out a year that has been less than flattering for the airline industry, particularly for beleaguered jet maker Boeing, which has faced heightened criticism about the quality of its products.
In January, a panel blew off an Alaska Airlines flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the Boeing 737 Max fuselage. No passengers died, but the incident followed two fatal 737 Max crashes in recent years — one in 2018 and another in 2019 — which triggered a 20-month grounding of the model worldwide.
What are the risks?
Accidents — fatal or otherwise — on board the tens of millions of commercial flights taken each year are highly unlikely, according to the latest data from the International Air Transport Association, the trade association of the world’s airlines.
There were 30 such accidents recorded in 2023, the most recent year for which full-year accident data are available, amounting to a risk of one accident every 1.26 million flights, says IATA. That’s lower than the risk the previous year, with one in every 770,000 flights reporting an accident.
“You’re at more risk … driving to the airport than you are … flying on an aircraft,” Anthony Brickhouse, a professor of aviation safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in New Jersey, told CNN. “In some parts of the world, you’re … less safe on an escalator than you are flying in an aircraft.”
“When accidents happen, obviously it catches everybody’s attention, but I think it’s really important for everybody to (take a) step back and let the investigators do their job,” he added.
An airline safety study published in August and co-authored by Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that between 2018 and 2022, the worldwide death risk per boarding was one in 13.7 million.
In other words, if you picked a flight at random and boarded in that time period, your chance of dying in a plane crash or a terrorist act approached one in 14 million.
But a strong safety record in the past does not guarantee the same in the future, and flyers may have newfound concerns given the recent spate of fatal crashes. The loss of more than 200 lives in the past few days alone will push the number of fatalities caused by commercial aviation accidents well above the 72 IATA recorded in 2023.
IATA Director General Willie Walsh said in the industry group’s most recent annual safety report, published in February, that 2023’s safety performance “continue(d) to demonstrate that flying is the safest mode of transport.”
However, he said “we can never take safety for granted” and that “two high-profile accidents in the first month of 2024 show that, even if flying is among the safe
