This year is on course to be the safest ever for commercial aviation, with roughly one passenger death for every 7.1 million air travelers worldwide, although aviation officials warn that improving accident statistics mask lingering dangers.
With only days left, 2011 appears set to eclipse the postwar record low rate of passenger fatalities, set in 2004 at one per 6.4 million passengers, according to Ascend, a consulting firm in London. This year also appears set to end with among the lowest total number of passenger deaths, at 401 to date, despite a sharp rise recently in the number of flights and passengers worldwide. In 2004, 344 passengers died in commercial aviation accidents, but the industry carried 30% fewer passengers on many fewer flights, according to Ascend. The figures exclude acts of terrorism.
"Safety is improving and it's improving faster than the industry is expanding," said Paul Hayes, director of safety at Ascend.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Locals gather at the site of a propeller-plane crash on Oct. 14 near Madang in Papua New Guinea that killed 28 passengers. The aircraft went down as a violent storm approached.
The record is best for carriers flying Western-built planes. This year, they have experienced one major crash per three million flights worldwide, roughly 49% better than in 2010 and roughly three times better than 2001, according to the International Air Transport Association, a global trade group. The figure represents the industry's best performance since IATA began collecting crash records in the 1940s. Including Russian-built and other types of airliners, the global accident rate fell slightly to about two crashes per million flights, or seven times higher than the rate for Western-built planes such as those made by Airbus—a unit of European Aeronautics Defence and Space Co.—Boeing Co., Bombardier Inc. and Embraer SA.
The year is also closing with another notable record: the longest period in modern aviation without a single fatal airliner accident, according to Harro Ranter, president of the Aviation Safety Network, a nonprofit organization that tracks accidents and incidents. Since Oct. 13, when a propeller plane crash in Papua New Guinea killed 28 passengers, nobody has died in an airliner, which is generally defined as a commercial, multi-engine airplane carrying 14 or more passengers. The longest previous such period was 61 days, in 1985, according to Mr. Ranter.
While the year's records are noteworthy, they don't guarantee future safety—and could even undermine it by breeding complacency, warned Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, a global advocacy organization. "We have such a fantastic record" improving safety globally that airlines and governments are tempted to say, "look how well we have fixed it, we're done now," he said.
Some safety yardsticks have not improved in many years, while recent accidents and incidents have exposed areas that still need work: safety on the ground at airports, the training of pilots to handle sophisticated computers, and greater awareness of flight hazards in some developing countries. Most of the aviation fatalities in 2011 occurred in Russia, Iran and African countries that have long faced air-safety problems, such as Angola and Congo.
This year is on course to be the safest ever for commercial aviation, with only one passenger death for every 7.1 million people carried world-wide. Andy Pasztor has details on The News Hub. Photo: Getty Images
The major accident rate in North America, for example, has remained flat at about one in 10 million flights, while in Africa the rate is roughly 40 times greater, according to IATA. But African aviation overall is generally far less dangerous than a few years ago, thanks to concerted efforts by local aviation officials and international regulators.
In more developed countries, ground accidents seem stubbornly resistant to stepped-up safety efforts by industry and regulators. Planes running off runways continue to be the most common type of hazard, totalling almost one-fourth of all crashes involving Western-built jets, although they account for a much smaller proportion of deaths. Causes include pilots descending without proper preparations for landing and crews failing to properly enter data or monitor flight computers. Safety officials say better training and discipline are part of the solution, but more-permanent remedies remain elusive.
Rarer but far more severe are so-called "loss of control accidents," when a functioning aircraft suddenly makes a catastrophic maneuver, according to Ilias Maragakis, an analyst at the European Union's European Aviation Safety Agency. At a conference EASA held in October about the phenomenon, he said that no single factor is to blame, so combating loss-of-control accidents "requires coordinated actions from multiple actors in aviation," such as airlines, regulators and equipment makers. One immediate response from regulators has been to require increasingly realistic training in simulators, including teaching high-altitude stall recovery techniques.
Another major safety threat stems from pilots who become confused by cockpit computers or who rely on automation too much. Such pilots can get into fatal difficulties when they are suddenly forced to revert to manual flying skills in an emergency. The increasing computerization of jetliners and similar big changes to flying mean "we need to admit that fundamental changes need to occur," including how pilots are recruited, trained and tested, Mr. Voss told an international safety conference in Singapore last month.
That shift is one of many that safety experts say are necessary to further reduce accidents. Historically, improvements have come largely from better equipment and pilot training. Experts believe that in the future, however, the biggest advances will come primarily from analyzing huge volumes of data about a broad array of incidents, culled from multiple carriers across the globe.
The technique "allows us to find that rare, high-risk event that a single carrier" could never identify or counter by itself, according to Ken Hylander, the top safety official at
Delta Air Lines Inc. and the head of a joint FAA-industry safety team.
Early versions of such forward-looking data analysis played a major role in cutting U.S. accident rates since the late 1990s, and they are being embraced by regulators and airline executives in scores of other countries. Now, the FAA and U.S. carriers are trying to involve foreign counterparts in similar dissection of safety data retrieved from actual flights and voluntary pilot reports.
The trend is gaining particular momentum in Russia and across Latin America.
Yet sharing safety data across borders poses huge technical and legal challenges. As a result, not a single foreign carrier is fully participating in — or providing safety data for — the FAA's most ambitious threat-analysis system.
In seeking common causes of crashes around the world, "no longer is there a clear distinction between domestic and international accidents," said Deborah Hersman, head of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, at a speech to the United Nations' aviation body in Montreal earlier this month.
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