Is flying or driving safer? What the numbers really say

According to IATA’s 2025 safety report, the recent reference works out to roughly one accident per 759,646 flights. On average, a person would have to fly for tens of thousands of years — around 49,246 — to experience a 100% fatal accident. And the trend improves year after year.

That level of safety isn’t luck. It’s the result of duplicated and triplicated systems, two trained pilots, scheduled maintenance with tracked part lifetimes, and crews who return to the simulator every six months. Safety experts consistently place commercial aviation among the safest ways to travel.

A car feels safe because you’re in control, you do it every day, and nothing usually happens. A plane feels risky for the opposite reasons: you’re not driving, it’s unfamiliar, and the rare event is the one you remember. Our sense of risk is shaped by how vivid and available an image is, not by how likely it is.

In a car, the constant small risks are invisible to us precisely because they’re routine. In a plane, the extraordinary safety record is invisible because you never see the thousands of uneventful flights — only the rare headline. The feeling and the data are pointing in opposite directions.

You don’t have to “feel” the statistics for them to be true. But it helps to know that every part of your flight — the aircraft, the two pilots, the maintenance, the air traffic control — exists to make that one-in-hundreds-of-thousands number what it is.

Understanding what happens at each phase of your flight does for your body what the numbers do for your mind: it turns the unknown into something expected. That’s where preparation, not willpower, makes the difference.