Do pilots live longer?

01 The research

Seventy years of data.

The strongest evidence comes from airline cohorts that follow every pilot employed over decades, from as early as 1950, and compare their deaths with national rates.

• British Airways: 6,209 male pilots and 1,153 flight engineers, 1950 to 1992. Pilots died at 61% of the rate for England and Wales.
• Nine European countries: about 28,000 cockpit crew, 1960 to 1997, pooling national cohorts that include the British and German data. Overall mortality was 64% of national rates.
• Germany: 6,061 cockpit crew at two airlines, 1960 to 1997. Overall mortality was 48% of the German population’s.
• United States: 5,964 former commercial cockpit crew, followed to 2008. Overall mortality was 58% of the US population’s, with lower death rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease.

One cause of death runs far above population rates: aircraft accidents. British Airways pilots died in them at about 147 times the expected rate, and US cockpit crew at about 16 times. The multiples are large partly because these deaths are rare in the general population. The European study’s authors concluded that, apart from aircraft accidents, occupational risks seemed to have limited influence on cockpit crew deaths.

A 1995 FAA analysis looked at 1,494 pilots who retired at 60 between 1968 and 1993. Half were expected to live past 83.8. The comparison figure, for 60-year-old white men in the general population in 1980, was 77.4. The authors found no support for the popular belief in aviation that retired pilots die younger than the general population.

Read: Irvine & Davies, Aviat Space Environ Med, 1999 · Blettner et al., Int J Cancer, 2003 · Zeeb et al., Epidemiology, 2002 · Yong et al., Am J Ind Med, 2014 · Besco et al., FAA, 1995

02 Why pilots do well

Selection does much of the work.

Epidemiologists call it the healthy worker effect. To start flying, a pilot passes a demanding medical. To keep flying, they keep passing them, which means some problems are found early. The authors of the US cohort point to selection, continuing medical surveillance, high socioeconomic status and low smoking.

Habits play a part too. In the German cohort, cardiovascular deaths ran at half the expected rate and heart attacks at 40%. The authors point to low smoking and early detection of heart problems as likely reasons. Across Europe, lung cancer deaths among cockpit crew were about half what national rates predicted.

The limit: comparing pilots with everyone else flatters pilots, because the general population includes people who were never fit enough to fly. These numbers describe a healthy, screened group. They say little about whether flying itself is good for you.

Read: Zeeb et al., Z Kardiol, 2003 · Blettner et al., Int J Cancer, 2003

03 A consistent signal

Melanoma keeps returning.

Melanoma is the most consistent cancer signal. A 2015 meta-analysis found about twice the expected number of new melanoma cases in pilots. In mortality studies, British Airways pilots died of it at 3.3 times the expected rate and European cockpit crew at 1.8 times. The US cohort and a German follow-up to 2014 also found raised rates, but with too few deaths to rule out chance.

Nobody has pinned down why. Sun exposure on duty and off, cosmic radiation and disrupted body clocks have all been proposed. Most of the data are decades old, and the studies can’t separate these factors.

Read: Sanlorenzo et al., JAMA Dermatology, 2015 · Irvine & Davies, 1999 · Blettner et al., 2003 · Yong et al., 2014 · Dreger et al., Occup Environ Med, 2020

04 New in 2026

A 2026 finding on radiation.

In August 2026, Harvard researchers published an analysis of 12.7 million US death certificates from 2020 to 2024, covering 503 occupations. Cancers classed as radiation-related made up 6.7% of deaths among 14,190 pilots and 6.9% among 7,170 flight attendants, after adjusting for age, sex and other factors. Flight attendants and pilots had the two highest shares of any occupation. Other cancers sat near the middle of the range.

The radiation-related group covered breast, prostate, thyroid and central nervous system cancers, melanoma and other skin cancers, lymphoma, multiple myeloma and leukaemia other than chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. Lung cancer was left out to avoid confounding by smoking.

It sits alongside a June 2026 report from the US National Academies. Flight crews receive among the highest occupational radiation doses in the US, though estimated annual doses generally stay below recommended limits. Because dose adds up over a career, the report calls for career exposure to be monitored. It found that US monitoring is neither required nor formalised.

The limit: the death-certificate study compares shares of deaths, not death rates, and it had no flight-hour or dose data. Studies with dose estimates disagree. A German study of 26,846 aircrew found no dose–response for any cancer it examined, though its pilots died of brain cancer at about twice the expected rate. In the US cohort, deaths from brain and other nervous-system cancers rose with estimated career dose. These are open questions.

Read: Patel, Liu & Jena, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2026 · National Academies, 2026 · Dreger et al., 2020 · Yong et al., 2014

05 Caveats

What the averages can’t tell you.

• Most cohorts are men who flew between the 1950s and the 2000s, with different aircraft, rosters and smoking rates from today’s.
• We found no published cohort of Gulf airline pilots, whose rosters often include ultra-long-range flying.
• Comparisons with the general population favour pilots because of selection.
• Group results can’t predict one person’s health, and none of this bears on fitness to fly.

06 Practical

Keep the trend in view.

A Class 1 medical confirms you meet the standard on the day. Between medicals, the useful questions are about trends, and about who acts on them.

Questions worth taking to your doctor or AME:

• Is a regular skin check sensible for me, and how often?
• What should I track between medicals, and who will act on it?

And one for your operator:

• Is my cumulative radiation dose recorded, and can I see it?

One more finding matters. In a survey of 3,765 US pilots, 56% said they had avoided healthcare at some point for fear of losing their medical. Any pilot health programme has to be clear about who sees what.

Read: Hoffman et al., JOEM, 2022 · Flying for a living: our evidence notes