2024-08-07 マサチューセッツ工科大学(MIT)
Recent research shows commercial flight has become roughly twice as safe, decade over decade, for half a century.
Credit: iStock
<関連情報>
- https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-flying-keeps-getting-safer-0807
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0969699724001066
航空機の安全性: それでも良くなっているのか? Airline safety: Still getting better?
Arnold Barnett, Jan Reig Torra
Journal of Air Transport Management. Available online: 13 July 2024
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2024.102641
Highlights
- Based on accidents, death risk per boarding for worldwide air travelers was 1 in 13.7 million over 2018-22.
- Death risk per boarding fell at about the same sharp rate over 2018-22 as in the previous half century, namely, 50% per decade.
- As in earlier periods, however, the nations of the world continued to exhibit large differences in passenger death risk.
- There is no evidence that convulsions in air travel caused by Covid-19 increased accidents or deliberate attacks on aviation.
- There is some evidence, however, that in-flight transmission of Covid-19 may have caused thousands of passenger deaths.
Abstract
We consider worldwide aviation safety on scheduled passenger flights over the years 2018–22, distinguishing the 34 weeks during the Covid-19 pandemic from the prior 26 weeks. Although the pandemic caused convulsions in airline operations, it caused no deviation from the trend under which global passenger death risk from accidents and deliberate acts dropped by about 7% per year. The nations of the world continued to differ substantially in passenger mortality risk, though nations in the previous “intermediate risk” category performed slightly better than those in the earlier “lowest risk” group. The difference, however, fell far short of statistical significance. Consistent with the previous pattern, passenger death risk in the “higher risk” nations was more than an order of magnitude higher than that in other nations. The transmission of Covid-19 aboard commercial flights may have taken thousands of lives worldwide over 3/20-12/22, which would have considerably exceeded passenger deaths over that period caused by accidents and deliberate attacks. However, this increase could be considered a transient effect if the pandemic is essentially over as of the mid-2020’s.