How Dangerous is Flying?
With the devastating loss of life in the Spanair crash in Madrid on August 20 and several other aviation incidents in the news recently, an article in the British newspaper The Guardian raises the inevitable question: how safe is it to fly?
"It is safer to fly than ever before," says Kieran Daly, group editor of Air Transport Intelligence. According to statistics, the accident rate for Western-built jet aircraft was nearly halved just from 1996 to 2007, and while 692 people died in airplane crashes worldwide in 2007, almost 3,000 people were killed while driving on British roads.
Some continents have better safety records than others. North America's accident rate is less than that in Latin America, the Asia-Pacific region, and Africa — which has the highest rate.
"Accidents in north America, Europe and Asia, with the exception of Indonesia, have become fantastically rare," says Daly.