Report: Airplane deaths at record low

Boarding an airplane has never been safer.

The past 10 years have been the best in U.S. aviation history, with 153 fatalities. That's two deaths for every 100 million passengers on commercial flights, according to an Associated Press analysis of government accident data.

Just a decade earlier, at the time the safest, passengers were 10 times as likely to die when flying on an American plane. The risk of death was even greater during the start of the jet age, with 1,696 people dying -- 133 out of every 100 million passengers -- from 1962 to 1971.

The figures exclude acts of terrorism.

Sitting in a pressurized, aluminum tube seven miles above the ground may never seem like the most-natural thing. But consider this: You are more likely to die driving to the airport than flying across the country.

"I wouldn't say air crashes of passenger airliners are a thing of the past. They're simply a whole lot more rare than they used to be," says Todd Curtis, a former safety engineer with Boeing and director of the Airsafe.com Foundation.

The improvements came even as the industry went through a miserable financial period, losing $54.5 billion in the past decade.

Just to stay afloat, airlines eliminated meals and added fees. But safety remained a priority. No advertisement of tropical beaches can supplant the image of charred metal scattered across a field.

There are still some corners of the world where flying is risky. Russia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia have high rates of deadly crashes. Still, 2011 had the second-fewest number of fatalities worldwide, according to the Flight Safety Foundation, with 507 people dying in crashes.

There are several reasons for the improvements:

The industry has learned from the past. Procedures are set and planes are designed with prior mistakes in mind.

Better sharing of information. New databases allow pilots, airlines, plane manufacturers and regulators to track incidents and react as needed.

Safety audits by outside firms.

An experienced workforce. Air traffic controllers, pilots and maintenance crews -- particularly in North America and Europe -- have been on the job for decades.

Luck. Safety experts discount the effect of chance. However, it takes just one big accident -- especially now with such mega-jets as the Airbus A380, which can carry 853 passengers -- to ruin an otherwise good period for safety.