Air travel remained incredibly safe in 2022. While the number of accidents might have increased by more than one-third, there were still only 39 in total. Overall, an accident occurred every 826,088 flights. What this means is that a single traveler taking one flight every day would most likely need to fly for 2,263 years before experiencing an accident.
Better still than such a low probability, the number of fatal accidents remained incredibly low at just five, and this was lower than the seven recorded in 2021. And just two of these incidents involved fatalities among crew and/or passengers. As a result, the fatal accident rate dipped from 0.27 per million sectors in 2021 to just 0.16, which was below the five-year average of 0.20.
What do the airline rankings say?
In making their determinations for each airline’s safety rating, AirlineRatings.com makes a (subjective) analysis of the following: crashes over the last five years, serious incidents over two years, audits from aviation’s governing bodies and leading associations, fleet age, expert analysis of pilot training and COVID-19 protocols. It’s list of top 20 airlines probably contains few surprises.