Air travel 'safer than ever'

According to an independent report in USA Today, air travel in the United States is safer than ever before.
A new method for calculating the specific risk to passengers flying on U.S. airlines shows that air travel is 60 per cent safer in the 21st century than it was in the 1990s and nearly 70 per cent safer than during the 1980s.
It has been more than four-and-a-half years since a passenger died as a result of an airline accident on a U.S.-registered jet, the longest ever stretch.At present, the risk is so small (one in 22.8 million, from 2000 through 2005) that the average traveler would need to fly every day for more than 64,000 years before dying in an airline accident.

Arnold Barnett, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the research was carried out, was quoted by USA Today, saying: "There may be a sense that you're no more likely to have an accident if you fly on a regular commercial jet than if you bite into a corn muffin."
Various new safety measures drafted in over the past ten, 15, or 20 years are now taking effect, according to one aviation electronics engineer.

Don Bateman stated that many safety features exist today that have been developed to improve safety and statistics like these were beginning to prove their effectiveness.