US airlines have carried passengers more than two light years since the last plane crash

Sometimes the most important news comes when something doesn't happen.

When a plane crashes, we all hear about it. Major accidents are major news events, with shocking images repeated over and over again on our television screens.

What is much harder to notice is the opposite: the absence of plane crashes.

An article on X by Ryan Radia made me realize how rare plane crashes have become in the United States. In response, I researched the relevant data and wrote this brief article to bring it to our attention.

The title shows how incredibly safe American airlines have become.

The last time a US airline crashed was on February 12, 2009, in New York State. Fifty people died.1

Private jets, small planes, and helicopters crashed more frequently, but this article focuses on the safety of scheduled commercial airline flights that most people fly with (flights regulated as Part 121 – travel within the United States) .

How far have US airlines carried passengers since February 2009? According to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, U.S. airline customers have flown 13.3 trillion passenger miles since then. Passenger miles are a simple way to take into account both the number of passengers and the distance they travel. A single passenger mile represents one person traveling one mile. So five people traveling ten miles would total 50 passenger miles.

13.3 trillion miles is a lot! This is equivalent to 535 million trips around the Earth or 28 million round-trip visits to the Moon.2

The distance is so long that it is not unreasonable to measure it in light years. A light year is the distance light travels in one year, or 5.9 trillion miles. Thus, the total distance traveled without accident is equal to 2.3 light years.3

It is difficult to visualize this immense distance. In the graph I compared it to the distance between Earth and the Sun. The distance traveled by U.S. airline passengers without a plane crash is 143,208 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. So, if the distance between the Earth and the Sun is represented by a line with a length of 10 cm, then the 2.3 light years would be represented by a distance of 14.3 kilometers.4

This shows me how difficult it is to notice the absence of something. I didn't know that no US airline had crashed in the last 15 years. And I didn't realize what an incredible safety record that was, given how many people board flights every day.

More importantly, it shows us how securely we can create technology if we want to.

One of the main reasons for improved safety in the US aviation sector was the open sharing of data. U.S. airlines have begun openly sharing information about all incidents that endanger passenger safety. This allowed everyone to learn from all incidents as a whole rather than just the incidents encountered by each airline.5

Because safety has become a top priority, flying is now extremely safe.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Hannah Ritchie, Simon van Teutem and Angela Wenham for their helpful comments.

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@article{owid-us-airline-travel, author = {Max Roser}, title = {US airlines have carried passengers more than two light years since the last plane crash}, journal = {Our World in Data}, year = {2024}, note = {https://ourworldindata.org/us-airline-travel} }Reuse this work freely

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