The deaths of 179 people in a Jeju Air plane crash at Muan International Airport in South Korea has renewed interest in the safety of air travel.
“2024 has been less safe than recent years, but the last decade has been by far the safest in airline history, and all the signs are that it will — largely — stay that way,” wrote David Learmount, an aviation journalist, in an email to National Post.
The crash came just days after an Azerbaijan Airlines flight crash landed in Kazakhstan on Christmas Day, killing 38 people. However, that crash wasn’t an “accident,” as might be normally classified in the air travel world, because it appears to have been shot down by Russian air-defence systems rather than something mechanical or flight-crew related having gone wrong that led to the crash.
Nevertheless, the combined death total of 318 in 2024 is the largest number of air-travel fatalities since 2018, the year that a Lion Air flight on a Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed in the Java Sea, killing 189 people. There were multiple other fatalities that year, too.
In addition to the deaths in Kazakhstan and South Korea in 2024, five members of Japan’s coast guard were killed when their plane collided with a Japan Airlines plane that was landing at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on Jan. 2, 2024; 18 people were killed when an Nepalese plane crashed at Kathmandu’s airport in late July; and a Brazilian passenger plane crashed into a residential neighbourhood in Sao Paulo in August — all 62 passengers died.
“This year, the air transportation industry will have transported five billion passengers around the globe and so I think that’s important to put that in context,” Hassan Shahidi, the president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, said in an interview.
However, the international airline industry was coming off one of the safest years on record: In 2023, there wasn’t a single fatal accident aboard a commercial jet plane.
Statistics around air travel safety can be confusing because databases may include corporate or military plane crashes in their statistics, in addition to commercial airplanes. Others, such as in the case of a February 2024 death, wasn’t even a death aboard the plane: a skydiving plane landed on a beach in Puerto Escondido, in Mexico, and one person on the beach was hit and died. Others might be included if they’re shot down in terms of the overall fatalities, but may not be included in accident statistics.
A database managed by the Flight Safety Foundation and the Aviation Safety Network shows one medical death aboard a jet plane in 2023 — in that case, the pilot died — and 10 related to the crash in Russia that was carrying executives from the Wagner Group mercenary outfit.
There were, however, 109 other deaths in 2023, all of them on turboprop or piston-engine planes, and not all of them commercial aircraft. This included a Yeti Airlines crash at Nepal’s Pokhara International Airport that killed 72 people
The overall fatality rate of scheduled commercial air travel in 2023, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), was 17 people per one billion passengers.
Over the past several decades, there has been a steady decline in the number of fatal accidents aboard commercial airliners. There were, for example, more than 50 fatal accidents aboard commercial airplanes in 1996, according to the Flight Safety Foundation. That was the year a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight collided mid-air with a Kazakhstan Airlines flight, killing 349 people in the deadliest-ever mid-air collision. It was also the year a Trans World Airlines plane exploded over the Atlantic Ocean shortly after departing New York City, killing 230 people.
The deadliest recent year was in 2014, when 761 people died on commercial flights. That’s the year Russians shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17, killing 298 people and a Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 239 people also vanished over the Indian Ocean that year.
Still, “when we look at accidents, they are rare,” said Shahidi.
This is especially true in the broader historical context.
In 1972 there were 55 commercial plane crashes. More than 2,400 people died aboard commercial planes that year, including 122 people when an Aeroflot plane lost its wings over Ukraine, an East German Interflug airplane caught fire and crashed, killing 156 people, and 101 people died when a plane crashed into the Florida Everglades. (In one case that year, an air hostess survived a 15,000 foot fall after terrorists blew up a Yugoslav Airlines plane, although the other 27 passengers and crew were killed.)
All this is happening, aviation authorities note, as the number of flights each year have ramped up dramatically.
However, even if there is a significant decline over time in the number of fatal airline accidents, accidents are not altogether infrequent aboard aircraft. Nor, for that matter, does anyone need to die in order for the perception that air travel is unsafe to grow. Earlier this year, a Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane operated by Alaska Airlines lost one of its doors while in flight.
Turbulence is the most common cause of on-board accidents, such as, for example, the May 2024 incident when 31 people were injured, and one died, when a Singapore Airlines flight hit extreme turbulence en route to London. Shahidi said there have been increasing numbers of turbulence related injuries; factors could include climate change leading to planes needing to fly through more severe turbulence and simple complacency among passengers who opt not to wear seatbelts.
“We want to understand more fully the relationship between turbulence and climate change and scientifically. But certainly we’re tracking that, and we believe that that is a growing concern,” said Shahidi.
Still, some safety practices are up to passengers.
“If you’re wearing a seatbelt, if you’re strapped in, the chances of injury is very minimal,” said Shahidi. “The airlines are now redoubling their efforts to keep the seatbelts on all the time except when you have to go to the restroom. So those are some of the practices being put in place to reduce that risk.”
Conflict zones and troubled areas of the globe are also of particular concern for air safety. In January 2020, Iran used surface-to-air missiles to shoot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 as it departed Tehran, killing 176 people. The Azerbaijan Airlines crash and the 2014 Malaysia Airlines crash were both shot down during the decade-long Ukraine-Russia conflict.
“There are responsibilities, regulations and guidance that both airlines and regulators and states have to follow to make sure that civilian aircraft are not put at risk,” said Shahidi.
— With additional reporting by Bloomberg News
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.