Simo K.Ekman, Michel Debacker, "Survivability of occupants in commercial passenger aircraft accidents", Safety Science, Volume 104, April 2018, Pages 91-98

The average survival rate is 86.3%, casualty rate 20.1% and RSF 0.16.

Survival rate increases to 95.6% when accidents with a 100% fatal rate are excluded.

That is, survival rates overall are good, and if there are any survivors, odds are that nearly all passengers will survive.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09257...

Note that this is the result of over a century of incrementally increasing safety measures. I don't have a good chart to show for aircraft, but I strongly suspect the trends are similar to those of the auto industry, where deaths measured in passenger-distance travelled halved about every two decades since 1910, with the exception of the first decade, where it halved in only 10 years.

See this chart (the relevant line is the "Deaths per billion VMT" (vehicle miles travelled), in red, descending left to right): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/US_traff...

From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

That is: with time, incremental improvements in design, procedures, equipment, training, standardisation, material, responses, and infrastructure add up. This shows up across transporation modes: ships, rail, cars, and aircraft.

This makes direct comparisons to early-20th-century airships difficult, as the entire safety mindset and understanding were different. Even just between the loss of the Akron and Macon, the addition of personal floatation devices (life preservers) decreased deaths from 73 to 2, in identical craft operated by the same organisation with similar crews. (Most of the Akron's crew drowned.) The US also used helium rather than hydrogen (a vast safety improvement itself), though due to the cost and scarcity of helium, limited venting capabilities (this directly contributed to the loss of the Shenendoah).

(I discuss several airship accidents, with links, in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28126643)

There's a general principle in manufacturing that efficiencies increase in direct proportion to experience (Wright's law, and others, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects). There's a similar effect in safety, though I'm not aware of a named principle. Effectively, with time, more of the possible things that can go wrong do. In a systematised discipline or craft, these lessons are incoprorated and guarded against.

Airships saw about 20 years of operating history, at relatively low intensity. Jet airliners have been in operation for nearly 70 years, at phenomenal scales of use, and built on earlier propeller-driven experience. There are ten times as many people aloft in airplanes at any moment than travelled by airship in an entire year. Direct safety comparisons are of very different experiences.

That said, I'd tend to suspect that airships would prove less safe on a similar passenger-distance metric (or cargo mass-distance), than powered heavier-than-air craft. Airships simply operate far too close to their safety margins, in a much more hostile environment (lower atmosphere), and with runaway feedbacks (buoyancy decreases with sink and increases with rise), whilst capacity and speed limit scales of operations.