US airlines have transported passengers for more than two light-years since the last plane crash
Sometimes, the most important news is when something isn’t happening.
When an airplane crashes, we all hear about it. Large crashes are major news events, with shocking pictures repeated endlessly across our television screens.
What is much harder to notice is the opposite: the absence of plane crashes.
A post on X by Ryan Radia made me aware of just how rare plane crashes have become in the United States. In response, I looked up the relevant data and wrote this brief article to bring it to our attention.
The title gives away just how incredibly safe US airlines have become.
The last time a US airline crashed was on February 12, 2009, in New York State. Fifty people died.1
How far have US airlines carried passengers since February 2009? According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, US airline customers traveled 13.3 trillion passenger miles since then. “Passenger miles” are a straightforward way to account for both the number of passengers and the distance they travel. A single passenger mile represents one person traveling one mile. So, five people traveling ten miles would sum to 50 passenger miles.
13.3 trillion miles is a lot! It’s equivalent to 535 million trips around the Earth or 28 million visits to the moon and back.2
It is such a long distance that it is not unreasonable to measure it in light-years. One light-year is the distance light travels over one year — 5.9 trillion miles. So, the total distance traveled without a crash equals 2.3 light-years.3
It is hard to visualize this vast distance. In the chart, I’ve compared it with Earth’s distance from the sun. The distance passengers traveled on US airlines without a plane crash is 143,208 times further than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. So, if the distance between the Earth and the Sun is represented by a line of the length of 10cm, then the 2.3 light-years would be represented by a distance of 14.3 kilometers.4
It shows me how hard it is to notice the absence of something. I was not aware that no US airline had crashed in the past 15 years. And I didn’t realize what an incredible safety record this represents, given how many people are boarding flights every day.
More importantly, this shows us how very safe we can make technologies if we want to.
One key reason for the safety improvement in the US airline industry was the open sharing of data. US airlines started to openly share information about all incidents that risked passenger safety with each other. This made it possible for everyone to learn from the aggregate of all incidents rather than just the incidents each airline encountered themselves.5
Because safety has been made such a clear priority, flying is now extraordinarily safe.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Hannah Ritchie, Simon van Teutem, and Angela Wenham for their helpful feedback.
Endnotes
The linked list is maintained by the US National Transportation Safety Board. It includes all accidents involving passenger fatalities of all Part 121 airlines from 1982 to the present. As of the time of writing (October 28, 2024), the last flight was on February 12, 2009. In that accident, a Bombardier DHC-8 flying for Colgan Air crashed in Clarence, NY. Wikipedia has the details: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407
Two passengers have died since 2009 in accidents that did not involve the crash of an airline (these were PenAir Flight 3296 and Southwest Airlines Flight 1380).
The cited statistic from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics refers to passenger miles for US air carriers (domestic and international) and is published by the excellent FRED website here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPM
The data is published in monthly totals, so I took March 1, 2009 as the cutoff (two weeks after the last crash). From March 1, 2009, till June 1, 2024 (the latest available data at the time of writing), the cumulative passenger miles were 13,311,986,432,000.
The circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles. This means the total passenger miles are equivalent to 13,311,986,432,000 / 24,901 = 534,596,459.3 trips around our planet.
The distance (Semi-major axis) from the Earth to the moon is 238,900 miles, so a return trip to the moon is 477,800 miles. 13,311,986,432,000 / 477,800 = 27,861,001.3
One light-year is approximately 5,878,625,370,000 miles (5.88 trillion miles). So, the total distance traveled is 13,311,986,432,000 miles / 5,878,625,370,000 miles per light-year = 2.26479 light-years.
Two comparisons:
Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system, is about 4.25 light-years away. A 2.26 light-year distance is more than half the distance to Proxima Centauri.
The light from the sun takes 8 minutes and 19 seconds to reach our planet. The distance between the Earth and the Sun is 92,955,807.2730 miles (this distance is known as one astronomical unit, 1AU). So, the cumulative passenger miles traveled without a fatality is 143,208 times further than the distance between the Earth and the Sun (13,311,986,432,000 / 92,955,807.2730 = 143,207.7).
See Andy Pasztor (2021) — The Airline Safety Revolution. In The Wall Street Journal; updated on April 16, 2021. For a broader overview of the relevant research, see Elizabeth Amorkor Okine, Esmaeil Zarei, Brian J. Roggow (2024) — Exploring the intellectual insights in aviation safety research: A systematic literature and bibliometric review. In Safety Science; Volume 170, February 2024.
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Max Roser (2024) - “US airlines have transported passengers for more than two light-years since the last plane crash” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/us-airline-travel' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-us-airline-travel,
author = {Max Roser},
title = {US airlines have transported passengers for more than two light-years since the last plane crash},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2024},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/us-airline-travel}
}
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