Pop Quiz: How safe is air travel today?

Posted by Sten Westgard, MS

The IATA (International Air Transport Association), whose 260 member airlines comprise 83% of global air travel, released their statistics on 2015 airline safety.

Can you guess how safe it is to travel? What was the global jet accident rate?

• 0.32 per million flights
• 0.22 per million flights
• 0.12 per million flights
• 0 per million flights

The answer, after the jump...

• The 2015 global accident rate was only 0.32. To be more precise, only 1 jet "hull loss" occurred every 3.1 million flights.
• However, for the member airlines of IATA, the rate was just 0.22, or only 1 accident per 4.5 million flights.
• Last year, the IATA accident rate was only 0.12 per million, or 1 accident per 8.3 million flights
• In 2015, there were ZERO jet hull loss accidents involving patient fatalities (that is, while jet hull loss accidents occurred, none of them involved fatalities)

Of course, if you think back to 2015, you will quickly realize these rates exclude a few major events, notably the loss of Germanwings 9525 (pilot suicide) and Metrojet 9268 (suspected terrorism). Since these are classified as "deliberate acts of unlawful interference" they are not included in the safety statistics. They were not accidents, they appear to have been planned murders.

To put these safety statistics into context: more than 3.5 billion people traveled in 2015 on more than 37.6 million flights (31.4 million by jet, 6.2 million by turboprop).

This is good news, of course, and demonstrates that it is, in fact, possible to achieve near perfection in safety. Obviously airlines have made considerable investments in safety.

But by comparison, healthcare is so, so much worse. That our profession is dedicated to patient lives, not simply transport, makes it all the more frustrating. Our primary goal is supposed to be taking care of patients, but we are far outclassed by other industries. We have declared some events to be "NEVER" but we have not been able to deliver on that.

All of these statistics can be found on the IATA website. Let's hope we can bring some of our healthcare processes up to that standard in 2016.