Just how safe is flying?

Looking at the whole industry over many years, serious accidents are very rare, and they keep getting rarer. MIT researchers found the worldwide death rate per passenger boarding has roughly halved every decade. For 2018–2022 they counted about one death per 13.7 million boardings, averaged across all airlines and all boardings worldwide.¹ In 2025, IATA counted 8 fatal accidents across about 38.7 million commercial flights worldwide.²

These are industry-wide averages across tens of millions of flights a year. They aren't odds or a prediction for any particular flight, airline or aircraft, and SafelyAboard doesn't produce those. What they do show is how much the whole system has learned.