Kobe Bryant Plane Crash: Is Air Travel Becoming Unsafe?

For the past few days, we have been hearing of unfortunate incidents involving aircraft. Just yesterday (January 27, 2020), there came a news that a plane of Ariana Airlines had crashed in Afghanistan. There was also an unfortunate event of basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, perishing alongside seven others when the private copter they were travelling in crashed on Sunday (January 26, 2020) allegedly due to bad weather.

While these incidents have raised concerns about the safety of commercial air travel, a new study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) says that it’s safer than ever.

The study, published in the journal Transportation Science, found that between 2008 and 2017, airline passenger fatalities fell significantly compared to the previous decade, reports Hindustan Times.

Globally, that rate is now one death per 7.9 million passenger boardings, compared to a death per 2.7 million boardings during the period 1998-2007, according to the researchers.

"The worldwide risk of being killed had been dropping by a factor of two every decade. Not only has that continued in the last decade, the improvement is closer to a factor of three," Arnold Barnett, an MIT scholar, who worked on the study was quoted as saying.