How Dangerous is Air Travel?

Last week a Spanair jet crashed in Madrid killing 154 passengers and crew. Days later a further 68 people were lost in Kyrgyzstan and this week 168 Ryanair passengers endured a terrifying emergency descent from 30,000ft when their jet suddenly lost cabin pressure. Such a spate of incidents inevitably leads the travelling public to ask: how safe is it to fly?

According to the statistics, traveling in a commercial airliner is becoming progressively safer. The accident rate in 1996 for western-built jet aircraft was 1.3 crashes per million flights, which nearly halved to 0.75 crashes per million flights last year. The fatality rate has been falling too, from 1,035 deaths in 2005 to 692 in 2007. In comparison, just under 3,000 people were killed on British roads last year.

"It is safer to fly than ever before," says Kieran Daly, group editor of Air Transport Intelligence. As for three incidents in a short space of time - coincidence, adds a safety expert. "They are aircraft and types of accident that are not related to each other at all," says David Learmount, the operations and safety editor of Flight International magazine.

The main warning is that some continents have better safety records than others. The crash rate for western-built jets in Africa is just over 4 per million flights, followed by 2.76 in the Asia-Pacific region and 1.61 in Latin America. By contrast, north America's accident rate is at 0.09 flights per million. Specifically, the EU blacklist of carriers banned from operating in Europe is dominated by airlines based in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"The geographical split has become more extreme over the years," says Daly. "Accidents in north America, Europe and Asia, with the exception of Indonesia, have become fantastically rare." Which makes the Madrid crash all the more surprising.