Passengers have traveled 13 trillion miles—2.3 light years—since the last serious airline crash affecting a U.S. carrier.
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. 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.
The last time anyone died in an airline crash in the U.S. was 2009, when a Colgan Air Bombardier DHC-8 went into an unrecoverable dive over Clarence Center, N.Y., killing 45 passengers, 4 crew and one person on the ground. Since 9/11, 2001, there have been four U.S. incidents with fatalities: American Airlines Flight 587, with 251 dead, Northwestern Air Lease flight PLR738, with 7 dead, Flight OP101, with 20 dead, and Comair Flight 5191, with 49 dead.
Max Roser writes: "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."
If you're talking about American manufacturers, of course, the record isn't so hot. Nor, for that matter, American workers.
As light as statistics like this are ("15 years since" strikes me as more impressive than passenger miles) it's interesting how upset people get at the publicity around it, a sort of online Car Defense Force.
