Last year marked the safest year on record for commercial air travel according to aviation experts. There were no commercial passenger jet fatalities in 2017.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/T. Ockenden
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Airlines recorded zero accident deaths in commercial passenger jets last year, according to two independent reports released at the beginning of 2018. The Dutch aviation consulting firm To70 and the Aviation Safety Network (ASN) both confirmed that there had been no commercial passenger jet fatalities in 2017.
"2017 was the safest year for aviation ever," Adrian Young of To70 told the Reuters news agency.
ASN President Harro Ranter explained that since 1997, "the average number of airliner accidents has shown a steady and persistent decline, for a great deal thanks to the continuing safety-driven efforts by international aviation organizations such as ICAO, IATA, Flight Safety Foundation and the aviation industry."
Aviation deaths around the world have been steadily falling in the past two decades. ASN said that as recently as 2005, there were more than 1,000 deaths aboard commercial passenger flights annually worldwide. To70 estimates that the fatal accident rate for large commercial passenger flights is now at 0.06 per million flights - or one fatal accident for every 16 million flights.
The two organizations did, however, disagree on the tally of fatal accidents in 2017, with To70 reporting two fatal accidents to passenger airliners, both involving small turboprop planes, while ASN counted "10 fatal airliner accidents, resulting in 44 occupant fatalities and 35 persons on the ground."
ASN added, however, that commercial cargo flight accidents involving civilians were also included in the count while military transport flight incidents were not — highlighting that even taking those into consideration would still leave 2017 as the year with the lowest numbers of fatalities in modern aviation history.
To70 meanwhile stressed, however, that non-fatal accidents also remained a threat, with engine failures and other engine-related accidents remaining an issue that the aviation industry has to improve. It also stressed that other safety risks had arisen in years, such as the rise of fires caused by lithium-ion batteries in electronics such as mobile phone carried on board.
Which of the world's 60 biggest airlines is the safest? Based on 2016 air safety data, Germany's JACDEC institute has compiled a ranking of carriers, showing that humans are still the biggest risk factor in air traffic.
Image: Reuters/E. Su
Unsafe China Airlines
About 3.7 billion passengers traveled by plane in 2016. Those who chose China Airlines as their carrier subjected themselves to the biggest risk, because the Taiwanese airline came in at the bottom of JACDEC's list of 60 globally operating carriers.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/D. Chang
Colombia's Avianca no alternative
The ranking was compiled on the basis of national air safety reports of the past 30 years. It measured the number of casualties and crashes against the airlines' traveled kilometers and passenger numbers. An airline without any loss of life and planes is given an index of zero to 0,001 points. Colombia's Avianca scored a value of 0.914 - the second-worst in 2016.
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High crash risk in Indonesia, too
Traveling with Garuda Indonesia - the third-worst performer on a score of 0.770 - isn't to be recommended either. Since its founding in 1950, the airline has reported 47 accidents - 22 of which have led to a total of 583 casualties.
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Ranking unbalanced?
But JACDEC's ranking has been criticized for not separately counting technical defects, human errors, weather incidents and terrorist attacks as reasons for plane crashes. Terrorism, for example, is really an airport safety problem; it accounts for 10 percent of accidents. Simon Ashley Bennett, an air safety expert at Leicester University, says a terror attack on a plane is as unlikely as...
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Bad weather
... an incident of freak weather leading to an accident. Latest data say that 10 percent of them can be attributed to snow, ice, fog and storms. Lightning isn't as dangerous as many believe. More prone to cause crashes are...
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Technology glitches
Today's modern aircraft brim with technology. Small wonder then that technical defects account for about 20 percent of accidents, says Bennett, surpassed only by the biggest cause...
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The human factor
Airline pilots are the biggest risk factor - they cause half of all accidents these days. Interaction between human beings and ever more complicated machines is prone to lead to mistakes, with the pilot always held accountable if something goes wrong.
Image: picture alliance/ROPI
Masters in the air
Yet, the 2009 crash landing in the Hudson River by Chesley Sullenberger shows that humans' piloting skills are not obsolete in modern aviation. Sullenberger's feat was only the third crash landing on water without casualties. All 155 passengers survived.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/S. Day
Scrap heap or repair?
Strangely enough, an aircraft that has been repaired after a crash gives an airline a better score with JACDEC than one that has been scrapped. Not a few experts question whether such a plane is really safe anymore.
Image: Reuters
More ambiguities
Further reason for criticism comes from the fact that an airline taken over by a rival has its score set back to zero by JACDEC. Lauda Air's 1991 crash with more than 200 casualties (see picture), for example, didn't affect the score of Austrian Airlines, which bought Lauda in 2004. Newly-founded airlines also start with zero points.
Image: picture alliance/dpa
And the winner is...
Hongkong-based Cathay Pacific was the safest airline in 2016, according to the rankiing of the Hamburg, Germany-based institute. Runners-up were Air New Zealand and China's Hainan Airlines. Germany's flagship carrier, Lufthansa, landed in 12th place. On balance, 2016 was among the years with the fewest accidents in aviation history.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Safer but deadly, too
Last year, JACDEC counted 321 deaths from plane crashes. But the Aviation Safety Network counted four deaths more due to a different inventory method. By far the worst aviation accident was that of a Bolivian charter flight carried out by LaMia, which crashed near Medellin, killing 71 people - among them almost the entire player roster of Brazilian football club AF Chapecoense.
