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The question says it all. It's a commonplace that "airliner travel" for passengers is far and away the safest travel, on almost any metric (per mile, hour, per human-year, etc).

However, I've seen it said that for airline crew (who obviously fly ~once or even many times per day) the danger becomes as high as say "driving in Europe".

(I don't know how you quantify that - perhaps "deaths per year". Also, I would assume the implication is versus "consumer car drivers", not versus eg truck drivers.)

This question is strictly about airliner† travel, i.e. large 20+ seat aircraft flying scheduled routes for name-brand national and international airlines: I don't want to see the statistics polluted with GA, private planes, bush flying, Fedex, rock band aircraft crashes from the 70s, etc.

Any ideas on this? is it

  • Just a myth?

  • A distortion of statistics? (Something like "sure, crew obviously die more than passengers, but taxi drivers proportionately die spectacularly more than crew" - sort of thing?)

†["airliner" is defined end of story in the tags on this site, but I just thought I'd spell it out to avoid a rash of confusion]

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  • $\begingroup$ Origin of the comparison between driving and frequent flying of flight attendants $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 27, 2024 at 15:15
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    $\begingroup$ The elevated radiation at high altitude is probably more of a health risk than a deadly crash. $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 27, 2024 at 16:32
  • $\begingroup$ @PeterKämpf Indeed! I thought that might be the case (I didn't bother explicitly stating "crashes" since it seems implicit in the car case that radiation is not involved (except perhaps at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umling_La )) $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 27, 2024 at 16:52

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These statistics are scattered and hard to process. One of the best summaries I've seen is here, checks against the original source. For GA, numbers had to be converted from 0.77 per 100k flight-hours to 35 per BPM (billion passenger-miles) at an average of 215 mph.

To avoid bias from low-frequency events, the numbers exclude 9/11 (act of war) and 737 MAX (unfit for common carriage as originally designed).

These filtered numbers give:

  • 0.07 per BPM for airliners
  • 0.11 per BPM for buses
  • 0.15 per BPM for trains
  • 7.3 per BPM for cars
  • 35 per BPM for general aviation
  • 212 per BPM for motorcycles

The average US car driver covers 37 miles per day, while the average FA flies 90 hours per month or 1,500 miles per day. So a daily car commute in the US is 2.5x more dangerous than a flight crew job. Switching the location to Europe with its shorter commutes or including 9/11 and MAX will make the numbers close to equal.

Proficiency is a key factor. Professional drivers are safer than average by a margin of 1:70. Airline pilots are safer than private pilots by 1:500. Even taxis average a lower accident rate than car commuters.

These number surprised even me, but they check across primary sources above. For airliners, high safety standards are definitely a factor. But even low-hours commercial pilots show low incident rates. Seems that when flying is your job, life, and passion, the brain rewires itself for it with massive improvement.

GA's safety record is comparable to other extreme sports and similar to scuba diving, which only borders on the extreme. It's still far safer than skydiving, mountaineering, or motorcycling. Best to treat it as a sport that can also be a means of transportation.

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    $\begingroup$ What happens more often: a fatal crash, or a flight being cancelled/delayed because the pilot died in a car crash during the commute to the airport? $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 27, 2024 at 20:32
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    $\begingroup$ @DeltaLima Is the plane a [s]Calhoun[/s] Boeing? Is the car a Pinto? Is the airline based in a LDC? $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 27, 2024 at 20:40
  • $\begingroup$ Also a factor when comparing TPM - the typical bus might seat 50-ish passengers. There are smaller planes in scheduled service, but when you're looking at typical Boeing and Airbus airliners in scheduled service they are more like 100 - 400 passenger capacity. $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 27, 2024 at 21:15
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    $\begingroup$ @Fattie Among extreme sports, GA's mortality is far from the highest, and similar to scuba diving. But the right way to treat it, in my view, is as a sport, with its associated risks. $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 27, 2024 at 22:34
  • $\begingroup$ Why exclude 911? $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 28, 2024 at 12:13
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From What percentage of airplanes are involved in a crash in their lifetime?, mean values derived from IATA 2014 statistics (IATA is the air carriers association):

  • IATA aircraft in the World: 23.000.
  • Flights per day per aircraft = 4.3.
  • A fatal accident after 3 millions flights.

You may read the linked question to see how we get to the following outcome:

  • A fictive airline with 320 aircraft, which is the size of an operator like Air France, faces one fatal accident each 6 years.

Now deriving new numbers from this result.

New assumptions:

  • A career is 40 years.
  • A crew works 5 days a week
  • 5 crews are required to cover 24 hours, thus each crew flies 4.8 hours a day. Thanks to @DeltaLima for providing this ratio.

From this:

$ \sf \small { \begin {array}{|l|l|l|} \hline \sf \small \text {Years between fatal accidents for the airline} & & \sf 6 \\ \sf \small \text {Daily probability for the airline} & \sf 1 / (6 \times 365) & \sf 4.57e-04 \\ \sf \small \text {Daily probability for a single aircraft} & \sf (4.57e-04) / 320 & \sf 1.43e-06 \\ \sf \small \text {Daily probability for a crew member} & \sf (1.43e-06) / (7/5) / (24/4.8) & \sf 2.04e-07 \\ \sf \small \text {Yearly probability for a crew member} & \sf (2.04e-07) \times 365 & \sf 7.44e-05 \\ \sf \small \text {Career probability for a crew member} & \sf (7.44e-05) \times 40 & \sf 2.98e-03 \\ \sf \small \text {Years worked before death} & \sf 1 / (2.98e-03) & \sf 1.34e+04 \end {array} } $

During their career, a crew member has a probability of dying in a crash of 0,298%. It means the probability is 100% after 13,400 years.

While I take a fictive airline of 320 aircraft, these final figures are mean values for any airline size. But the distribution of accidents is not flat, it depends also on local factors, e.g. how maintenance and training are delivered.

See also: What are the statistical probabilities of commercial aircraft accidents?

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    $\begingroup$ @quietflyer: If for this airline fatal accidents have a mean period of 6 years, for the 6 first years, nobody died, the next day the whole crew and the passengers died. And don't call me Shirley :-) $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 27, 2024 at 19:08
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    $\begingroup$ @mins I am trying to understand your logic in your calculation. You divide by a factor 8 to arrive at 5700 years. Are you assuming average 8 hour working days? I think that is extremely high. In staff planning we need approximately 5 FTE for 1 position in 24/7 operations. You need 3 people to work around the clock in 8 hour shift, but you also have to account for weekends, sick leave, holidays, training etc. $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 27, 2024 at 20:26
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    $\begingroup$ For pilots, FAA has a regulatory limit of 1,000 flight hours per year (FAR 121.481(f)). $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 28, 2024 at 7:55
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    $\begingroup$ ".... It means the probability is 100% after 13,400 years." This statistical statement is obviously wrong and hints that you should rethink how this conclusion was derived. To make it more clear: Just because the chance of rolling a 6 on a die is 1/6, the chance to roll at least one 6 after 6 rolls is not 100%. After any finite number of rolls it will in fact never be 100%, instead it is 1-(5/6)^n, where n is the number of rolls. $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 28, 2024 at 12:24
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    $\begingroup$ @mins There’s no law requiring a crash every 6 years. If you say there’s an average 1 crash in 6 years, then it’s exactly the same as the dice: you roll a 6 once every 6 rolls on average. But not with 100% probability, not at all. $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 29, 2024 at 1:43

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