How likely are you to survive an airline accident?

You will survive, most likely

Rather likely.  In fact, the chance of you surviving a general accident while flying a U.S. domestic airline is 95.7%.

And the word “accident” here doesn’t just mean a bumpy landing, it means:

“An occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft… in which any person suffers death, or serious injury, or in which the aircraft receives substantial damage.”

At first, I was going to end my post here, but then I continued reading and found that in the statistic above, the NTSB considered ALL accidents between 1983 and 2000.  However, they state that in some of the accidents, occupant survivability was never in question.  Like maybe when a tire blows out and the plane skids off the runway.  What about the “real” accidents, with smoke and fire?

Thankfully, the NTSB likes to be thorough, so they looked at all of the “serious” accidents as defined by:

“accidents that involved fire (pre-crash or post-crash), at least one serious injury or fatality, and either substantial aircraft damage, or complete destruction.”

In this type of crash, your survivability drops to 55.6%.  This number includes the ultra-rare total-loss crashes such as TWA flight 800 and ValuJet 592.  However, if you exclude total-loss accidents where nobody had a chance, your survivability rates jumps to 76.6%.

The NTSB concludes that the most likely outcome of an accident is that most of the occupants will survive.  This is strongly counter intuitive according to popular culture.

[source] An NTSB survivability report [PDF] (1991)

All worries should, however, be put to rest when asking the following question…

“What are my chances of dying during my next flight?”

According to Arnold Barnett, an MIT professor who is in expert in the field of flight safety statistics, your chances of dying on your next domestic flight are 1 in 60 million.  In other words, you can fly every day for the next 164,000 years before you can reasonably expect to die in a plane crash.

That being said, the safest seats are in the back…

Survival rates for various parts of the passenger cabin, based on an analysis of all commercial jet crashes in the United States since 1971 where detailed seating charts were available. (Illustration by Gil Ahn. Diagram Courtesy of seatguru.com.)