Is Flying Safer Than Driving? The Numbers Compared

Quick answer: Yes — by the widest of margins. In 2024 there were 244 on-board fatalities in commercial aviation across 40.6 million flights, according to IATA's 2024 Annual Safety Report. The World Health Organization's latest global estimate for road deaths is 1.19 million a year — roughly 4,900 times as many deaths. Put another way: everyone who died in commercial plane crashes in 2024 equals the number who die on the world's roads in under two hours.

2024 in the air

The International Air Transport Association's 2024 Annual Safety Report, presented in an ICAO working paper, gives the full picture for commercial aviation:

• 40.6 million flights were operated worldwide in 2024.
• 46 accidents met IATA's classification criteria, of which 7 were fatal — up from a single fatal accident in 2023, and above the five-year average of five.
• 244 on-board fatalities, compared with 72 in 2023 and a five-year average of 144.
• The all-accident rate was 1.13 per million flights — one accident for every 880,000 flights. That is better than the five-year average of 1.25, but slightly worse than 2023's 1.09.
• The fatality risk was 0.06, below the five-year average of 0.10, though double the 0.03 recorded in 2023.

The long-term trend is one of steady improvement: a decade ago, the five-year average was one accident for every 456,000 flights. For 2020–2024 it is one accident for every 810,000 flights.

Safety is not identical everywhere. In 2024, Africa had the highest all-accident rate at 10.59 per million sectors across 10 accidents — yet kept its fatality risk at zero for the second year in a row. North America has maintained a fatality risk of zero since 2020.

2021 on the roads

The WHO's Global Status Report on Road Safety 2023 estimates 1.19 million road traffic deaths in 2021 — more than 3,200 a day. Nine in ten of those deaths happened in low- and middle-income countries, and road crashes remain the leading killer of children and young people aged 5 to 29.

Set the two totals side by side:

• 1,190,000 ÷ 244 ≈ 4,877 — roads kill roughly 4,900 times as many people in a year as commercial aviation.
• Roads kill about 136 people every hour (1.19 million ÷ 365 ÷ 24). The 244 people who died in plane crashes in all of 2024 fit inside two hours of road deaths.
• At 2024's accident rate of one accident per 880,000 flights, someone flying every single day would statistically face one accident in about 2,400 years of daily flying.

How you measure risk changes the answer

Counts are not risk, and safety researchers know that the way you measure risk changes the ranking. Deaths can be compared per journey, per hour of travel or per kilometre travelled — and the answers differ.

The European Transport Safety Council's statistical overview of EU transport risks found:

• Per distance travelled, rail and air are the safest modes, followed by bus. Road travel collectively has the highest fatality risk per passenger kilometre of any mode.
• Bus travel has about 10 times lower fatality risk per passenger kilometre than car travel.
• Air travel has about the same fatality risk per passenger kilometre as the train, and about half the risk of coach travel.
• Per hour of travel, aviation looks less safe than trains and buses, because almost all of a flight's risk is concentrated in take-off and landing — the cruise accounts for only a small share.

The practical reading: for long journeys, flying wins on every measure. For short hops under about 600 km, ETSC notes that the train can be safer per kilometre than the plane, because the flight's fixed take-off and landing risk is spread over fewer kilometres.

What goes wrong in each mode

The things that kill people in the air are very different from the things that kill them on the ground.

• In commercial aviation in 2024, the most frequently reported accidents were tail strikes and runway excursions — problems at take-off and landing. A growing concern was conflict-zone risk: two aircraft were downed in conflict zones in 2024, killing 38 people in Kazakhstan and 5 in Sudan.
• On the roads, WHO points to five key risks behind most deaths: speeding, drink-driving, and failure to use motorcycle helmets, seat-belts and child restraints.

One reason the road toll stays so high is that its causes are everyday behaviours, repeated billions of times a day, while aviation's causes are rare technical or operational failures in a tightly regulated system.

How these numbers were counted

IATA's 2024 Annual Safety Report counts accidents on commercial scheduled flights (jets and turboprops) using its own accident criteria; the 244 on-board fatalities exclude seven additional deaths classified as "other". WHO's road death figures are 2021 estimates that combine national death registrations with statistical modelling for countries with weak registration. The two totals are therefore not perfectly like-for-like — commercial aviation deaths are directly counted, while WHO road deaths include modelled estimates. But the gap is thousands-to-one, so the conclusion does not depend on the counting method. For the running global toll see the global statistics, for news-tracked incidents accidents today, and for the US picture the United States page.