Here’s where to find the most up-to-date flight safety information

Though airplane accidents are still a rarity, and some people can quell their anxieties about flying when they have the numbers.

It can be nerve-wracking to fly right now. Just this month, the collision of an American Airlines plane and a US Army helicopter killed 67 people in Washington, DC, and a Delta Airlines flight crash-landed in Toronto. In 2024, the year started off with a door panel blowing off an Alaska Airlines flight, and then months later there eventually would be two fatal crashes involving South Korean and Azerbaijani airlines. Though airplane accidents are still a rarity, according to the numbers. Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-authored an August 2024 airline safety study that between 2018 and 2022, the worldwide death risk per boarding was one in 13.7 million. But for anxious flyers, having all this information may not alleviate a fear of flying. In fact, it might do the opposite and could even influence panic symptoms at the airport, Jonathan Bricker, an affiliate psychology professor at the University of Washington told CNN. “The anxious mind is never satisfied with the answer, the data,” Bricker said. “It’s always looking for more information to reassure itself, because it will think of another possibility.”