US airlines transported passengers for 2.4 light-years without a crash

When an airplane crashes, we all hear about it. Large crashes are major news events, with shocking pictures repeated endlessly across our television screens.

What is much harder to notice is the opposite: the absence of plane crashes.

A post on X by Ryan Radia made me aware of just how rare plane crashes have become in the United States. In response, I looked up the relevant data and wrote this brief article to bring it to our attention.

The title gives away just how incredibly safe US airlines have become.

There was no US airline crash for 16 years between 2009 and 2025. On January 29, 2025, a mid-air collision occurred between a helicopter and a passenger plane on the Potomac River. The last crash before that was an accident in New York State on February 12, 2009.[1]

Private jets, smaller planes, and helicopters have crashed more frequently, but this article is about the safety of the regularly scheduled flights of commercial airlines that most people travel with (flights regulated as “Part 121”-travel in the US).

How far did US airlines carry passengers in these 16 years? According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, US airline customers traveled 14 trillion passenger miles in this period. “Passenger miles” is a straightforward way to account for the number of passengers and the distance they travel. A single passenger mile represents one person traveling one mile. So, five people traveling ten miles would sum to 50 passenger miles.

14 trillion miles is a lot! It’s equivalent to 561 million trips around the Earth or 29 million visits to the moon and back.[2]

It is such a long distance that it is not unreasonable to measure it in light-years.

One light-year is the distance light travels over one year — 5.9 trillion miles. So, the total distance traveled without a crash equals 2.4 light-years.[3]

It is hard to imagine this vast distance. The largest distance that I can somehow relate to is the Earth’s distance from the sun. The distance passengers traveled on US airlines without a plane crash was 150,000 times further than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. So, if the distance between the Earth and the Sun is represented by a line of the length of 10cm, then the 2.4 light-years would be represented by a distance of 15 kilometers.[4]

It shows me how hard it is to notice the absence of something. I was unaware that no US airline had crashed during those 16 years. And I didn’t realize what an incredible safety record this represented, given how many people are boarding flights every day.

It also shows us how very safe we can make technologies if we want to. One key reason for the safety improvement in the US airline industry was the open sharing of data. US airlines started to openly share information about all incidents that risked passenger safety with each other. This allowed everyone to learn from the aggregate of all incidents rather than just the incidents each airline encountered.[5]

Because safety was made a clear priority, flying is now extraordinarily safe.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Hannah Ritchie, Simon van Teutem, and Angela Wenham for their helpful feedback.

Endnotes

1] [The linked list is maintained by the US National Transportation Safety Board. It includes all accidents involving passenger fatalities of all Part 121 airlines since 1982. On February 12, 2009, a Bombardier DHC-8 flying for Colgan Air crashed in Clarence, NY. Wikipedia has the details: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407 Two passengers have died in the 16 years since 2009 in accidents that did not involve the crash of an airline (these were PenAir Flight 3296 and Southwest Airlines Flight 1380).

2] The cited statistic from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics refers to passenger miles for US air carriers (domestic and international) and is published by the excellent FRED website here: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPM The data is published in monthly totals, so I took March 1, 2009 (two weeks after the last crash) as the start of the period and January 31, 2025, as the end. From March 1, 2009, till January 31, 2025, the cumulative passenger miles were 13,971,048,718,000. The circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles. This means the total passenger miles are equivalent to 13,971,048,718,000 / 24,901 = 561,063,761.2 trips around our planet. The distance (Semi-major axis) from the Earth to the moon is 238,900 miles, so a return trip to the moon is 477,800 miles. 13,971,048,718,000 / 477,800 = 29,240,369.9

[3] One light-year is approximately 5,878,625,370,000 miles (5.88 trillion miles). So, the total distance traveled is 13,971,048,718,000 miles / 5,878,625,370,000 miles per light-year = 2.3765842929 light-years.

[4] Two comparisons: Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system, is about 4.25 light-years away. A 2.37 light-year distance is a bit more than half the distance to Proxima Centauri. The light from the sun takes 8 minutes and 19 seconds to reach our planet. The distance between the Earth and the Sun is 92,955,807.2730 miles (this distance is known as one astronomical unit, 1AU). So, the cumulative passenger miles traveled without a fatality is 150,297.75 times further than the distance between the Earth and the Sun (13,971,048,718,000 / 92,955,807.2730 = 150,297.75).

[5] See Andy Pasztor (2021) — The Airline Safety Revolution. In The Wall Street Journal; updated on April 16, 2021. For a broader overview of the relevant research, see Elizabeth Amorkor Okine, Esmaeil Zarei, Brian J. Roggow (2024) — Exploring the intellectual insights in aviation safety research: A systematic literature and bibliometric review. In Safety Science; Volume 170, February 2024.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “US airlines transported passengers for 2.4 light-years without a crash” by Max Roser (Published on December 2, 2024; updated on July 1, 2025.), published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

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