Big plane crashes are big news. Cable news stations block hours of coverage, even as stories of the crashes develop slowly. People just can’t look away.
Yet air travel is safe. Safer than just about anything. Robert Sumwalt, who served as chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board from 2017 to 2021 and is now executive director of the Boeing Center for Aviation and Aerospace Safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, knows all of this.
“From a statistical perspective, there is an extremely low risk with flying on a U.S. scheduled passenger airline,” Sumwalt said during a May 28 news conference from the Embry-Riddle campus in Daytona Beach. “So we want the traveling public, as I used to say when I was an airline captain, we want the traveling public to be able to sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.”
A new study released May 28 by the Boeing Center points out that commercial aviation accidents are “exceedingly uncommon,” but “receive disproportionate media attention and can create a persistent impression that air travel is inherently dangerous.”
The comparative study demonstrates through statistics just how safe air travel is by evaluating fatality rates per mile, per event and per hour. It compares air travel to other occupations and activities, such as riding a motorcycle, running a marathon, and even taking a bath.
Mihhail Berezovski, author of “Comparative Risk Metrics for U.S. Commercial Aviation,” and an associate professor of mathematical sciences at ERAU, found that a person is twice as likely to die by drowning in a bathtub than by taking an airline flight.
There is a 1.4 times greater chance of dying by choking on food than flying, Berezovski found by looking at risk of activities per hour of exposure.
“The purpose is not to suggest that eating or bathing are dangerous activities, no,” Berezovksi said. “The purpose is to create a consistent framework that allows us to compare between activities people perceive emotionally very differently.”
Sumwalt said the purpose of the study is not to suggest that there are no risks associated with flight.
“The fact that the United States went 16 years without a fatal passenger fatality aboard a U.S. scheduled airline, the fact that we had that does not make the record over the last 16 months in any way acceptable,” Sumwalt said. “We’re not tone deaf. We’re aware of that. We realize that safety is a continuous journey and the industry must never let its guard down.”
In addition to evaluating comparative risks, Berezovski — an associate professor of mathematical sciences — calculated lifetime and annual odds of death by commercial aviation crashes.
What are the odds of being killed in a plane crash?
A person has a 1 in 45.5 million chance of dying in a plane crash in a given year, the study found.
Here are a few other odds Berezovski published:
What is the risk of air travel compared with other modes of transportation?
Another measure of how to determine transportation safety, Berezovski wrote, is risk per mile of travel. His report compared flying to traveling by bus, train, cars, bicycles, and motorcycles.
The report shows that passengers on motorcycles — the most dangerous mode mentioned — travel about 4.1 million miles per fatality. By comparison, air travelers go 90.9 billion miles per fatality.
Some of the other miles per fatality detailed include:
Flying versus skiing, skydiving, mountain climbing
If a person takes a flight every day, how many years would it take before the fatality rate will catch up to that traveler?
Berezovski found that there are nearly 98 million events — one person on one flight — before an air travel fatality occurs. That means if a person boards a flight every day for the rest of time, it will take 267,573 years before a death can be expected.
For context, all of the land of the Earth formed one continent, Pangea, during the Permian geological period 225,000 years ago.
“Individuals often conceptualize risk in terms of discrete events,” the report states. “Risk per boarding or per trip directly addresses this intuition by estimating the probability that a participant in a single occurrence experiences a fatal outcome.”
The report determined there are 1.3 million skiing and snowboarding events per fatality. So if one skis daily, it will take 3,642 years before a fatality should occur.
Scuba diving is the next riskiest: 1,489 years, followed by marathon running, 1,328 years; and skydiving, 624 years. Climbing Mount Everest delivers one fatality for every 72 events, meaning a death can be expected in less than a year.
“Those comparisons are sometimes surprising, because maybe recreational activities feel normal and familiar and while flying can be emotionally uncomfortable, it (has) an extremely low level of fatality risk ,” Berezovski said. “… Human perception of risk does not always align with statistical reality,”
Air travel is safer, but crashes and deaths grew in 2025
Safe air travel has largely gotten safer. U.S. commercial airlines went 16 years without a crash until the Jan. 29, 2025, mid-air collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and an Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River, leading to the deaths of 67 people, 64 aboard the airplane and three on the Sikorsky UH-60L.
That event was a starting point for the study, Berezovski said.
The International Air Transport Association released its annual safety report for 2025 in March, finding that the eight fatal crashes in 2025 topped the seven in 2024 and the five-year average of six.
According to IATA, the 2025 crashes amassed 394 onboard fatalities, a sharp increase from 244 in 2024 and the five-year average of 198.
Despite that, Willie Walsh, IATA’s director general, also noted flying is the safest form of long-distance travel, as borne out by the rolling five-year average rate for fatal accidents.
“A decade ago (2012-2016), the rate stood at one fatal accident for every 3.5 million flights,” Walsh said. “Today (2021-2025) it is one fatal accident for every 5.6 million flights. Flying is so safe that even one accident among the nearly 40 million flights operated annually moves the global data.”
Boeing Center intends to update study in future years
The Boeing Center is committed to updating the study in future years, Berezovski said.
Kristy Kiernan, associate director of the Boeing Center, said the purpose of the study is not to be self-congratulatory as an industry.
“That is not what we want to be doing in aviation safety. This is about risk perception and empowering the public,” Kiernan said. “One fatality is too many. One fatality is unacceptable to us.”
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: What’s more deadly, plane crash or bathtub drowning?
Reporting by Mark Harper, Daytona Beach News-Journal / The Daytona Beach News-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
