2017 flies high for global airline safety

Last year was the safest in terms of airline passenger deaths for at least 12 years, the world’s airlines say,

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) counted 19 deaths among passengers and crew in six fatal plane accidents in 2017.

That doesn’t include the 35 people on the ground who died when a Turkish Boeing 747 cargo plane operated by ACT Airlines crashed into a village in Kyrgyzstan in January 2017. Four crew died in that crash.

It was one of six fatal accidents in 2017 – the other five involved turboprop aircraft, IATA said in its 2017 airline safety performance report, published yesterday (NZT). The report noted none of the fatal accidents in 2017 involved a passenger jet. IATA said its all-accident rate for 2017 was 1.08 accidents for every 1 million flights. That compared to 1.68 in 2016 and

2.01 for the five-year period from

2012-2016.

During 2017, 4.1 billion passengers flew on 41.8m flights.

The 2017 rate for major jet accidents was 0.11 for every 1m flights – measured in jet hull losses. It was equivalent to one major accident for every 8.7m flights, and compared to a rate of 0.39 in 2016 and the

2012-2016 five-year rate of 0.33, IATA said. The 280 airlines that belong to IATA had no fatal accidents or hull losses in

2017, with either jet or turboprop aircraft. The 2017 accidents don’t include the June crash into the Andaman Sea of a Chinese Shaanxi Y-8 aircraft of the Myanmar Air Force. The 122 military staff and their families who died included

15 children.

Other organisations – the Aviation Safety Network and aviation consultancy

To70 – have also noted 2017 was a particularly safe year for commercial aviation, although their numbers differ from IATA’s.

Already in 2018 there have been two major deadly airline crashes. In the space of just a week earlier this month, two planes crashed, killing 136 people.