If you’re getting your travel itch back but are an anxious flyer, here’s some reassuring news: Commercial aviation has been safer than ever, according to a paper in Transportation Science by a statistician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who examined worldwide data on fatalities in scheduled passenger flights over the past several decades. (Note: The analysis was conducted pre-pandemic, before passenger flights took a big hit and fell by 60 percent in 2020; a bigger concern today with flying is potentially contracting Covid-19.)

Overall, the death risk per boarding was 1 in 7.9 million in 2008-2017, compared to 1 in 2.7 million in 1998-2007 and 1 in 1.3 million in 1988-1997. Airlines based in developed nations had a death risk per boarding of 1 in 28.8 million, compared to 1 in 10.8 million in 1998-2007 and 1 in 4.4 million in 1988-1997.

In advancing nations, the death risk was 1 in 10.9 million in the past decade, compared to 1 in 1.9 million and 1 in 1.0 million in the two decades prior. Less developed nations had the highest fatality statistics but also saw improvements—1 in 1.3 million deaths per passenger in 2008-2017, compared to 1 in 400,000 and 1 in 200,000 in the previous two decades.

But “even higher-risk aviation in less developed countries poses limited danger,” the author wrote—since a risk of 1 in 1.3 million means that a passenger could take one flight a day for 3,600 years “before becoming an aviation fatality.”

And in the U.S. or other developed countries, “a randomly chosen young traveler is considerably more likely to grow up to be president than to perish on her next flight.”

Of note, the risk of perishing in an airplane due to a deliberate act (such as terrorism) has also decreased considerably over the past several decades, despite increased media attention, and was only one-tenth as high in 2008-2017 as in 1968-1977.

Here are some other interesting tidbits from the paper:

• More than 4 billion passengers fly a year (pre-pandemic statistic).
• Though there is much year-to-year variability, fatal air accidents are rare.
• Overall, worldwide death risk per boarding dropped by 96 percent from 1968 to 2017.
• For industrialized countries, it would take 79,000 years of flying daily before a passenger would be killed.