Another way of asking this is: Of all the airliners that have taken off and returned to the earth, what proportion have actually landed?
Or another way: If you were born as an airliner, what is the probability that you would die at work?
I'm specifically interested in:
- airliners, being used as airliners (for example, not as emergency troop transports)
- hull-losses
- aircraft that took off and then crashed or were otherwise lost (i.e. not simply destroyed while on the ground)
We'd have to start with the total number of airliners constructed, which at a guess is a number in the region of 50-60 thousand - but perhaps someone has a reasonably accurate figure already collated from available sources.
Then we'd need to know the total number lost in flight - I guess it's just possible someone has such a figure.
It would be interesting to see how the figure changes for aircraft limited to particular eras.
Related questions
A related question has been pointed out in the comments, What percentage of airplanes are involved in a crash in their lifetime?
That's not explicitly about airliners, though in fact most of the discussion there seems to be based on airliners, and it contains some useful figures, including in one of the answers:
That's a rate of 1.56 % aircraft with a fatal accident, or 1 / 64.
This is just an extrapolation from data about 2014, but it's a start.
However, it is based on incidents that kill people, rather than flights that damage airframes beyond repair, so it is about something slightly different.