Global Air Travel Last Year: 22 Million Jet
Flights, Just 1 Fatal Accident
Sept. 6, 2022
By Dominic Gates
Source The Seattle Times
(TNS)
Times/TNS
SEATTLE — How safe is air travel? Last year,
when large commercial jets took off 21.6 million times throughout the world,
there was just one fatal accident.
Boeing's comprehensive annual compilation of data
about air accidents involving large Western-built jet airliners, released at
the end of August, shows a decadeslong trend toward safer air travel.
At the beginning of the jet age, in 1959, there
were 40 fatal accidents per million flights. The accident rate fell rapidly and
a decade ago was down to less than one fatal accident per million flights. Last
year, it was less than 0.05 fatal accidents per million flights.
In airlines operated by North American airlines,
last year the fatal accident rate was zero.
Past tragedies brought enhanced safety
One cannot minimize the awful tragedy of a jet
airliner crash. The two deadly crashes of Boeing 737 MAXs in 2018 and
2019 still weigh heavily on the minds of many in the aviation world and among
air travelers.
Yet those accidents were exceptional.
Fatal airliner crashes, common as recently as the
1960s, have been increasingly rare since the late 1990s. Measured by fatalities
per total number of people carried, air travel is the safest form of mass
transportation.
The plunge in the aviation accident rates over
decades is due to enormous technical and organizational advances: safer
technology systems on planes, more efficient air traffic control, and thorough
training of pilots and maintenance mechanics.
Intensely detailed investigations into fatal
accidents by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and its
counterparts in other countries have produced significant safety improvements
over the decades — and the recent MAX crashes have done so once again.
Jim Hall, who was NTSB chair in the
1990s and oversaw investigations into the deadly 737 crashes
in Pittsburgh and Colorado Springs, Colorado, recalls how those
accidents resulted not only in Boeing fixing the rudder system
implicated in the crashes but in pilots being trained in upset recovery
maneuvers.
Other accidents in that period led to changes in
the way flight crews communicate with one another to ensure efficient teamwork
in an emergency.
Eventually airlines developed management protocols
to systematically address safety risks at every level from the flight deck to
the maintenance hangar to the pilot training schools and their mission control
centers.
After the MAX crashes, Boeing also
committed to a formal Safety Management System throughout its enterprise.
" Boeing is saying the right
things," Hall said. "Hopefully they are doing the right things."
He said the decline in regulatory oversight in the
years before the MAX crashes — when Congress insisted on the Federal
Aviation Administration delegating more and more of the risk assessments
on new aircraft to Boeing itself — has been arrested by the MAX
tragedies.
"We lost our eye on aviation safety
when Congress was deluded into the changes that brought the MAX crashes,"
Hall said. "Anyone in aviation safety should have been embarrassed by the
information that came out after those accidents."
Now, though, the Aviation subcommittees
in Congress "have been all over the FAA to do its
job," he said.
"Hopefully we'll now see a continued trend of
safer aviation," Hall concluded.
Boeing's data does not include accidents involving
small private planes, small seaplanes, business jets or turboprop planes — such
as those flown by Alaska Airlines subsidiary Horizon Air. Commercial
jets manufactured in Russia and China are also excluded due to lack
of operational data.
The data set comprises flights by large jet
airliners built largely by Bombardier, Embraer, Airbus
and Boeing, and includes both passenger and cargo planes. In 2021, there
were just over 28,500 such airplanes operating worldwide, of which just shy of
13,500 were Boeing jets.
Globally, the only fatal airliner crash among them
was the crash of a Boeing 737 "classic" airplane operated
by Sriwijaya Air in Indonesia, in which 62 people died.
That plane may have suffered an autothrottle
malfunction. The final investigation report is expected imminently and may well
lead to some corrective action by Boeing.
The recent safety record of American and Canadian
airlines is remarkable.
In 2018, on a Southwest Airlines flight,
metal shrapnel from an uncontained engine failure blew out a cabin window,
killing one passenger. That was the only death in an accident on a passenger
airliner operated by North American airlines in the past decade.
There were a dozen deaths during the decade in
crashes of cargo planes operated by American carriers. These included the 2013
crash of a 747 cargo jet operated by commercial freight charter carrier
National Air Cargo that crashed carrying military supplies in Afghanistan,
killing seven people.
Overseas, the record is more blemished, with
nearly 1,600 deaths from 27 scheduled passenger jet accidents in the past
decade. That includes the 346 deaths from the MAX crashes, which were
exceptional in that the two aircraft were almost new and took off in perfect
flying weather.
Most of the other overseas accidents in the past
decade involved much older aircraft, often at small airlines with dubious
safety records.
The 1,600 global fatality total over 10 years
includes the 239 people aboard the Malaysia Airlines 777 that
disappeared in 2014 over the Indian Ocean — thought by many in the
aviation world to be a pilot suicide.
However, Boeing's data set excludes the 289
people who died later that same year when Russian-backed forces shot down
another Malaysia Airlines 777 flying over Ukraine. That was a
deliberate military act, not an aviation accident.
Similarly, it doesn't include the 176 people
killed on a Ukraine International Airlines 737 that Iranian forces
shot down as it took off from Tehran in January 2020. At a
moment of heightened military tension with the U.S., the Iranians mistook
the jet for an incoming cruise missile.
So far this year, there has been a single large
jet transport fatal accident: In March, a China Eastern 737-900, the
model before the MAX, crashed in the mountains of the Guangxi region,
killing all 132 people aboard.
The investigation of that accident has not been
published, but The Wall Street Journal reported in May the preliminary
conclusion of American investigators that this may have been a deliberate
suicidal dive into the ground by one of the pilots.
In the current unstable world, airliners are essentially
so safe, especially in North America and Europe, that the risk
of some malign action to bring down a plane may be greater than the risk of a
fatal accident.
___
(c)2022 The Seattle
Times
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