‘African airlines improved on safety performance in 2017’

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) yesterday released data for the 2017 safety performance of the commercial airline industry showing continued strong improvements in safety.

According to the report, the SubSaharan Africa continued to make strong progress on safety with airlines in the region having zero jet hull losses and zero fatal accidents involving jets or turboprops for a second consecutive year.

The organization reports that compared to the previous five years, the region has recorded a decline in accident rate.

Worldwide, the all accident rate (measured in accidents per 1 million flights) was 1.08, an improvement over the all accident rate of 1.68 in 2016 and the rate of 2.01 for the previous 5-year period (2012-2016).

According to the report, the 2017 rate for major jet accidents (measured in jet hull losses per 1 million flights) was 0.11, which was the equivalent of one major accident for every 8.7 million flights.

This was an improvement over the rate of 0.39 achieved in 2016 and also better than the five-year rate (2012-2016) of 0.33.

Altogether, there were six fatal accidents with 19 deaths recorded among passengers and crew.

On the African safety performance in 2017, IATA’s Director General and CEO, Alexandre de Juniac, said, “Airlines in Sub-Saharan Africa continued to improve their safety performance. The goal is to achieve world-class safety. For a second year in a row, airlines in the region experienced no passenger fatalities and no jet hull losses”.

He added, “Counting all accidents, the performance of African airlines on the IOSA registry was more than three times better than non-IOSA airlines in the region.