Within the First World, observed differences across air carriers in passenger death risk are almost never statistically significant. But given the rarity of fatal crashes, even a lopsided split of crashes across airlines is unlikely to achieve significance. For greater perspective about relative...

We consider the fatal accident records of 58 major world airlines, and in particular try to compare appropriately the safety records of airlines whose route structures overlap and which thus compete for passengers. We separately review data about the 18 principal U.S. domestic airlines and 40...