How Many Plane Crashes Have There Ever Been?

 Approximately, how many air accidents do you estimate, according to some statistics, have there been in total? it originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Response from Tom Farrier, former Director of safety at the Air Transport Association, on Quora:

Approximately, how many air accidents do you estimate, according to some statistics, have there been in total? If you are interested in every type of aircraft you have ever flown, this is an incredibly difficult question to answer. I don't think anyone can try without doing a lot of research. No one in government even bothered to track such things until the first systems of air regulations began to develop in the 1920s, and even in that there was little interest in formally documenting and investigating every accident until prominent people began to die in them.

The best data I can offer is for commercial jet aircraft accidents, which have been pretty well tracked since 1959 onwards. Boeing publishes an "annual statistical summary of commercial jet aircraft accidents"; the most recent edition contains the following table: no subtitles

Where you see the term "hull loss", which refers to accidents involving damage to the aircraft that are beyond economic repair. So, from 1959 to 2015:

1,525 passenger jet accidents, with 29,165 deaths on board (crew and passengers) and 800 innocent bystanders, with 717 of those accidents involving destroyed aircraft; and

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A total of 1,918 accidents involving aircraft of all types (including cargo), killing 29,646 on board and 1,216 on the ground, resulting in a total of 973 aircraft destroyed.

These numbers exclude quite a few losses that other databases might include, such as:

Fatal and non-fatal injuries due to natural causes;

Fatal and non-fatal self-inflicted injuries or injuries inflicted by others;

Fatal and non-fatal stowaway injuries hiding outside areas normally available to passengers and crew;

Non-fatal injuries resulting from atmospheric turbulence, normal maneuvers, loose objects, embarkation, disembarkation, evacuation and maintenance and maintenance;

Non-fatal injuries to persons not on board the aircraft;

Experimental test flights; and

Deliberate acts such as sabotage, kidnapping, terrorism and military action.

Although these numbers may seem horrible (and are in terms of the human cost mined in them), things have been improving decidedly over time.

Historically, almost a third of all this subset of air accidents have resulted in deaths, but in the most recent decade only 17% of accidents have resulted in deaths.

Historically, a quarter of all accidents resulted in aircraft being destroyed; in the most recent decade, that drops to just 5%.

Perhaps most surprising is that about 10% of lives lost in jet crashes over time have been lost in the past decade; that may not seem so good until you see how much passengers have increased over time:

no subtitles

Looking at this another way, here's a different "fatality" chart that includes all types of aircraft, showing passenger deaths in aviation accidents since the early 1940s: no subtitles

Clearly, the trend of deaths is steadily marching down, even as passenger operations are increasing almost geometrically.

Now, add to that the clear downward trend of accidents: no subtitles

To tie a bow around all this, we Security Geeks seek truth in numbers by creating “rates” - the number of undesirable events compared to how often people are exposed to the possibility of encountering one of those undesirable events. Here's a more useful graph from Boeing's annual summary that tells the story at a glance: no captions

So sit back, relax and enjoy your flight. The odds are pretty good that you'll get where you're going safely.