After Southwest Airlines incident, how safe is flying on commercial airlines?

The news of the emergency on Southwest Airline flight 1380 has been written large in the headlines.

An exploding engine grounded the aircraft on the flight from New York to Dallas on Wednesday morning, depressurising the cabin and killing one passenger on board.

Commercial air accidents are big news, but the attention grabbing nature of a fatal incident might distort the risk we are taking when boarding a plane.

What are the numbers and just how safe is air travel?

The figures from last year, as reported by the Herald's Aviation, Tourism and Energy Writer, Grant Bradley, were extremely reassuring.

2017 had a total of 10 fatal airliner accidents.

Extremely low, given the worldwide air traffic of about 37 million flights.

By this reckoning the rate is one fatal passenger flight accident per 7.3 million flights.

The risk is less than a fraction of one in a million. Yet, as more flights take to the air, should we be increasingly concerned?

Given the current growth trajectory, the number of commercial flights is projected to skyrocket to 59 million by 2030.

You would expect that as the number of departures rises, so should the number of accidents.

This has not been the case.

1972 was the single worst year for commercial air travel. Over the course of the year 2,429 passengers were killed in 99 reported incidents, but remarkably there was only a fraction of today's air traffic.

There were under half a billion aircraft passengers in 1972.

Five decades later that number has climbed to 3.6 billion occupied seats. Yet, the number of incidents has taken a nose dive.

There are no two ways about it: flights are getting safer.

Factoring in the overall number of flights and the improvement in technology and safety procedures undertaken by airlines, the risk to passengers is miniscule.

As Andrew Charlton, managing director of Aviation Advocacy, a Swiss strategic consulting firm, put it : "The single most dangerous part about flying is driving to the airport."