Are there statistics showing the relationship between safety and the age of aircraft? Some people seem to believe that some airplanes are less safe to fly just because they are older than others. As a pilot myself who has learned that the safety of aircraft is nothing to do with their age as long as they are properly maintained in accordance with the regulations regarding airworthiness, I take the idea to be wrong and try to talk those people out of their idea whenever I come across them. Some people are persuaded but some are not.

I believe there are nothing better than brute facts in changing one's belief and here is my question: Are there statistics that support the idea that old aircraft are no less safe than new aircraft?
I could not find statistics, so I parsed the data available on https://aviation-safety.net/database. This site does have a statistics page, but it does not have an answer to your question.

I'm not a statistician so I'm sure there are much better ways to crunch and graph this data, but the raw data I found was:


The data includes 5075 crashes from the years 1919 - 2019.
The mean aircraft age is 15.58 years. This age is the age of the particular aircraft involved in the crash, not the "age" of the aircraft's type.


I did not normalize the data in any way, so take it with a grain of salt and except some skews and outliers (for example, a 75 years old DC-3 crashed earlier this year - https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20190121-0). On the other hand, crashes in the early years will naturally skew the data, as every aircraft that crashed was new at the time of the crash.