What are the odds of dying in a plane crash?
Evidence quality 4.13/5
Eight-dimension review score against the quality rubric . Each dimension scored 1–5.
- D1 Source grounding
- 4/5
- D2 Source authority
- 4/5
- D3 Arithmetic
- 5/5
- D4 Uncertainty
- 4/5
- D5 Scope
- 4/5
- D6 Prose
- 4/5
- D7 Perception honesty
- 5/5
- D8 Caveat completeness
- 3/5
Lifetime probability · lifetime, US adult
1 in 58,824
0.002% lifetime chance
Most people overestimate this.
range 1 in 125,000 to 1 in 28,571
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≈ As likely as
Perceived
Flying is one of the most commonly cited phobias. In the Chapman Survey of American Fears, roughly one in four US adults reports being afraid or very afraid of flying in an airplane. That framing collapses "dislike turbulence" and "avoid all flying" into one bucket, but the headline is robust: flying feels much riskier than it is.
Rough estimate: ~1 in 1,000 per flight feels about right to most people
Source: Chapman University (2022) — Chapman Survey of American Fears, Wave 8
Actual
~1 in 13,700,000 per flight
global commercial aviation passengers
Avg. lifetime encounters: ~236 (4/yr × 59 yr)
Show derivation
Assumes ~4 commercial boardings per year for a typical US adult (BTS data for adults who fly, including connecting segments), 59 years of remaining adult life, constant risk per boarding (conservative vs the long-term safety trend).
Caveats: Excludes private aviation, which has a meaningfully higher per-hour fatality rat…
Excludes private aviation, which has a meaningfully higher per-hour fatality rate. Also excludes major single-event anomalies (e.g., conflict zones, single-carrier outliers) which can dominate short windows but not long averages.
Risks at similar odds
Other risks with roughly the same likelihood — useful for calibration.
Child pedestrian (residential)
What are the odds of a young child being hit by a car after wandering onto a residential street?
Spaceflight (astronaut)
What are the odds of dying as an astronaut on a spaceflight mission?
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Most fear of flying isn’t really about the probability — it’s about control, enclosure, and the vividness of the few disasters that do make the news. The numbers reflect the opposite picture: commercial aviation is one of the safest forms of transport ever built, with the per-boarding fatality rate improving by roughly an order of magnitude each decade for the past half-century.
If you fly a couple of times a year for the rest of your adult life, your accumulated lifetime risk is roughly 1 in 58,000 — comparable to the lifetime odds of being killed by a hornet, wasp, or bee sting, and about 600× lower than the lifetime odds of dying in a car crash. For most readers, the rational concern is the drive to the airport, not the flight.
What the numbers don’t tell you: the distribution is not uniform. Private aviation, general aviation, and certain regional carriers in certain regions are all meaningfully riskier than the global scheduled-commercial average used here. If any of those describe your flying, the per-boarding number from Barnett’s MIT analysis is the wrong baseline for you.
Related tidbits
Dying in a car crash is roughly 560× more likely than dying in a plane crash over a US adult lifetime (~1 in 105 vs ~1 in 59,000). The fear of flying does not flip when people get in the car.
A US adult is about as likely to be struck and killed by lightning as to die in a plane crash, within a factor of 5 (~1 in 280,000 vs ~1 in 59,000). The two feel nothing alike.
Sedentary behavior accounts for ~9% of premature deaths globally. The odds of dying in a plane crash are about 1 in 11 million per flight. Your desk chair is statistically more dangerous than your seat on the plane.
Claim ledger
Every number below is what each source reported, with the verbatim quote we relied on and how we arrived at our figure. Click any link to verify directly.
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[1] MIT News / Arnold Barnett — Study: Flying keeps getting safer
Study: Flying keeps getting safer- Statistic
1 fatality per 13.7 million passenger boardings (2018-2022 commercial aviation)- Excerpt
“"The risk of a fatality from commercial air travel was 1 per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally in the 2018-2022 period, a significant improvement from 1 per 7.9 million boardings in 2008-2017." ”
- Source data from
- 2024-08-01
- Accessed
- 2026-04-11 · archived copy
- Calculation
- Barnett's "death risk per boarding" is already the exact statistic we want as the native value. Normalized = 1 − (1 − p_flight)^(flights_per_year × years) ≈ p_flight × flights × years for small p. Using ~4 boardings/year and 59 years: 4 × 59 / 13,700,000 ≈ 1 in 58,000 lifetime.
- Independence
- Barnett's MIT analysis pulls from IATA/ICAO commercial-aviation incident records plus passenger-boarding counts; overlaps with the NTSB accident database rather than being fully independent, though Barnett's per-boarding methodology is the distinctive analytical layer here.
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[2] National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) — Statistical Reviews — US Civil Aviation Accident Statistics
Statistical Reviews — US Civil Aviation Accident Statistics- Statistic
NTSB publishes annual US civil aviation accident statistics covering Part 121, Part 135, and general aviation from 2005-2024- Excerpt
“"Statistical Reviews: 2005-2024 Accident Statistics — a downloadable Excel file providing summary statistics for US civil aviation accidents from 2005 through 2024. US Civil Aviation Accident Dashboard: 2008-2024 — an interactive report accompanying the statistics tables." ”
- Source data from
- 2024-12-01
- Accessed
- 2026-04-26 · archived copy
- Calculation
- The NTSB research page provides downloadable accident statistics and an interactive dashboard covering 2005-2024. Part 121 air carrier operations (passenger-seat configuration >9 seats) have a well-documented record of extremely low fatal accident rates, consistent with Barnett's per-boarding figure. Used as a corroborating institutional source rather than the primary number.
- Independence
- NTSB and Barnett draw from overlapping aviation incident databases, so treat as partially dependent verification, not two fully independent estimates.