Week 10: Final Approach Is Five Percent of the Flight and Half the Risk

Boeing's own decades of accident data show exactly where a flight's last mile sits — a sliver of total flight time carrying roughly half the fatal risk

10 May 2027

Boeing has published a Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents every year for decades. Its current edition’s worldwide 2016–2025 breakdown by phase of flight puts 13% of fatal accidents in final approach and 35% in landing — 48% of all fatal accidents concentrated into the two phases that, combined, last only a few minutes out of a multi-hour flight. Cruise, which is most of a flight’s actual duration, accounts for only 10% of fatal accidents; in Boeing’s own words, “the landing phase accounts for only 1% of flight time, but 35% of all fatal accidents.”

That mismatch — minutes of flight time, half the fatal risk — is the specific, measurable version of this course’s thesis that aviation supplies. It isn’t that landing is technically harder than cruising in some vague sense; it’s that landing is the phase where the aircraft is closest to the ground, closest to other traffic, and has the least room to recover from an error, all at once, right at the point where the flight is otherwise “basically done.”

The complication for the thesis: aviation’s whole safety culture is built around treating the last mile as categorically different, not just “a bit riskier,” which is a stronger response than any other domain in this course has taken. Stabilised-approach criteria, go-around procedures, and mandatory landing checklists all exist specifically to make the final phase harder to rush, precisely because the industry’s own long-run data says rushing it is where the fatal accidents concentrate. That’s the opposite instinct from software’s “ship the demo, harden later” or a startup’s “hit this quarter’s number” — aviation treats its last mile as the part you’re least allowed to treat casually, not the part you’re most tempted to. Every other domain in this course has had to learn that lesson the hard way, from a failure. Aviation built its entire procedural culture around already knowing it.