Anyone who’s scared of flying knows the drill: your heart races, your palms get sweatier and sweatier, and your mind can’t stop thinking about every possible thing that might go wrong. Despite that, you’re determined to face your fear for the sake of going on that much-awaited vacation.

But what if experts had the right statistics to calm your nerves – and not just any experts, but those at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), whose studies are authoritative in many fields, including aviation?

According to research published early last month in the Journal of Air Transport Management, US scientists claim that the risk of death each time a passenger boards a plane has roughly halved every decade over the last half-century, ie, from 1968 to 2017. For the period from 2018 to 2022 – the focus of this research – this risk fell at the same rate.

“The risk of a fatality from commercial air travel was one per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally in the 2018-2022 period – a significant improvement from one per 7.9 million boardings in 2008-2017 and a far cry from the one per every 350,000 boardings that occurred in 1968-1977,” reports an MIT news release.

It could be argued that this figure may be skewed insofar as this study period includes the Covid-19 pandemic. But the researchers clarify: “Although the pandemic caused convulsions in airline operations, it caused no deviation from the trend under which global passenger death risk from accidents and deliberate acts dropped by about 7% per year.”

So, when you board a plane, you have a one in 13.7 million chance of not getting home – even though, however reassuring this statistic may be, it will do nothing to calm fears of turbulence. Moreover, the figure remains a general average.

Indeed, not all countries can boast the same level of safety. According to MIT, low-risk countries for air travel are those of the European Union, Japan, the United States, China, Norway, Australia, New Zealand and Montenegro.

Meanwhile, the report adds that the risk is slightly higher in South Africa, Qatar, Jordan, Taiwan, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, Thailand and, curiously enough, Singapore. But rest assured: the probability is still only one death for every 80 million passengers.