If you travel a lot, you may be wondering what the safest way to travel is for transportation. I’m sure most of you have heard that airplanes are the safest form of transportation. Nonetheless, many people still feel that airplanes are scarier than vehicles such as cars or trains on land.
In this blog, I will prove to you as much as I can about the safety of airplanes, by analyzing data on airline safety, and by comparing U.S. transportation safety data side-by-side over a 10-year period.
Data Description
- Airline Safety data
This data comes from TidyTuesday, which you can find from here.
This dataset has a total of 336 observations and 6 variables. It mainly describes the airlines, accident time, type and total number of accidents.
| Variable | Class | Description |
|---|---|---|
| x | integer | Number of observations |
| airline | character | Airlines (asterisk indicates that regional subsidiaries are included) |
| avail_seat_km_per_week | double | Available seat kilometers every week |
| year_range | character | Range of year (1985-1999 & 2000-2014) |
| type_of_event | character | Types of events happened : incidents, fatal accidents, fatalities |
| n_events | integer | Total number of event that happened |
- US transport safety data
The dataset provided by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS). I chose the most recent transportation data for this decade available from 2010-2019 for analysis.
This dataset contains 10 observations and 4 variables. It mainly describes the airlines, accident time, type and total number of accidents. It shows the number of fatalities by mode of transportation in the United States, the number of miles traveled by billion passengers and fatalities by billion passenger hours.
| Variable | Class | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Transport_modes | character | 9 common modes of transportation |
| Year | integer | Year(from 2010 to 2019) |
| Fatalities | integer | Fatalities due to traffic accidents (2010-2019) |
| Total_billion_passenger_miles | double | The sum of all miles traveled by all the vehicles of a specific means of transport |
| Fatalities_divided_by_total_billion_passenger_miles | double | Fatalities divided by the sum of all hours traveled by all vehicles of a transportation means |
Analysis
Overall changes
Let’s first compare the change in the difference between different types of aircraft safety events in the time frame of 1985-1999 and 2000-2014.
| Type of event | 1985-1999 | 2000-2014 | Variation differences(%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| fatal accidents | 122 | 37 | -69.67 |
| fatalities | 6295 | 3109 | -50.61 |
| incidents | 402 | 231 | -42.54 |
Combining Table 1 from Valensia, 2022 and Figure 1, we can find that the number of various types of aircraft safety accidents from 2000-2014 showed a significant decrease compared to the number from 1985-1999, with the number of fatal accidents decreasing the most, by nearly 70% year-on-year.
This is a very good result, and we have reason to believe that with the improvement of technology and effective regulation, the safety of aircraft as a means of transportation is improving.
Next I will analyze the changes in aircraft safety events for airlines.
Airlines changes
In the Figure 2, Figure 3 and Figure 4, the arrows point to indicate the direction of data change in both time periods. We can see that most of the arrows are pointing to the left, which means that the number of airline safety incidents is decreasing from 85_99 to 00_14. We have reason to believe that traveling by air is becoming safer and safer.
The number of fatalities resulting from safety accidents should be an important influencing factor for those who choose a certain mode of transportation. Based on Figure 4, someone might think that Malaysia Airlines is an untrusted airline, as it is the one with the highest increase in fatalities over time.
But determining whether a particular airline is trustworthy based only on the number of fatalities is not a good approach because some large airlines will carry more people and thus accumulate more fatalities than small and medium-sized airlines. A more ideal method would be to divide the number of fatalities by the number of miles to show the normalized mortality data.
Fatalities by weekly seat kilometers
Because aircraft transportation safety changes over time, I next want to select the most recent period of time for which data are available: 2000-2014, for further analysis of the number of fatalities by airline.
According to Figure 5 we can find that in the normalized mortality data, Kenya Airways has the largest number of fatalities by seat kilometers for the period 2000-2014.
According to information found online, the cause of the largest discrepancy in the number of fatalities on Kenya Airways based on available seat kilometers per week was the accidental crash of an Airbus flight in early 2000 that caused the deaths of 169 people, and the crash of Kenya Airways Flight 507 in 2007 that killed 114 people.
Different transport modes safety comparison
As the United States is one of the largest transportation markets in the world, we will highlight the safety of aircraft by comparing and analyzing data on different types of transport modes over a 10-year period.
In the Figure 6, we can find that the number of fatalities in commercial airplanes is extremely low compared to those in Car, Light truck and Motorcycle.
From Figure 6 alone, land vehicles cause the highest number of fatalities, and there is also a significant difference between private and commercial aircraft, where the number of fatalities is 100 times higher than that of commercial aircraft. From Figure 7, it can be found that commercial aircraft have the lowest fatality rate, both in terms of fatalities by passenger miles and passenger hours. Compared to other types of transport modes, the safety of airplanes can be trusted.
Summary
Death by air travel is rare compared to other types of fatal accidents. By analyzing airline data, we have learned that the safety of most airlines has improved over time, while a small number of airlines have experienced an increase in fatalities due to serious crashes. However the probability of such incidents is extremely low. You can minimize the risk of such accidents by avoiding airlines with a high normalized fatality rate.
By comparing the safety of different types of transport modes in the United States over the last 10 years, we know that commercial aviation is the safest mode of transportation. The commercial airline fatality rate has been quite low over the past decade, even if you fly all your life, the probability of death is only 1 in 1500.
Combined with the above analysis, we are reasonably confident that commercial flights are the safest means of transportation.
Reference
Silver, N. (2014). Should Travelers Avoid Flying Airlines That Have Had Crashes in the Past?. Retrieved from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/should-travelers-avoid-flying-airlines-that-have-had-crashes-in-the-past/
turbli. (2022). The Safest Transports Modes, Ranked by Statistics From 10 Years of Data. Retrieved from https://turbli.com/blog/the-safest-transport-modes-ranked-by-statistics-from-10-years-of-data/
US Bureau of Transportation Statistics. (2022). National Transportation Statistics.
Valensia, J. (2022). Has Airlines Safety Improved Over Time ✈️? [Blog]. https://jval.quarto.pub/exploring-data-with-jo/posts/airsafety/
Wikipedia. (2022). Kenya Airways Flight 431. In Wikipedia.
Wikipedia. (2022). Kenya Airways Flight 507. In Wikipedia.