WSJ: 2017 Marked Safest Year in Commercial Aviation History

The global airline industry achieved a previously unimaginable safety milestone in 2017: independent accident data doesn’t indicate a single airline passenger fatality resulting from a jet crash anywhere in the world.

The statistic, released Monday by a Dutch affiliate of the U.S.-based nonprofit Flight Safety Foundation, excludes cargo flights, military transports and accidents caused by intentional acts.

Jet makers, the industry’s international trade group and the air-safety arm of the United Nations all compile separate, slightly different annual lists of major commercial accidents and fatalities. The average number of airliner accidents and fatalities has been falling since 1997, with steady and dramatic safety improvements in recent years.

In the U.S., scheduled airlines haven’t experienced a fatal crash on any type of equipment since February 2009, when 50 people died from a Colgan Air turboprop plummeting into the ground while approaching to land at the Buffalo, N.Y. airport. In the intervening years, the Federal Aviation Administration shows an average of at least nine million flights per year.

But for safety geeks, global 2017 results were literally off the charts. Since modern jet propulsion became commonplace some six decades ago, safety experts said they couldn’t recall a year without passenger fatalities occurring on jet aircraft.

“It’s the culmination of decades of work by thousands of people,” according to industry consultant John Cox, a former U.S. airline captain, accident investigator and senior pilot-union safety official. “Now that we have proven we can do it,” he said Monday, industry leaders and regulators will continue to improve the record, “because the expectation in aviation is ‘never good enough.’”

The Aviation Safety Network released a comprehensive, world-wide list of 10 fatal airliner accidents in 2017 resulting in 44 onboard deaths, including 12 peopled killed Sunday when a single-engine Cessna Gran Caravan crashed in Costa Rica.

But five of those were cargo operations, and the rest involved propeller-powered planes. With nearly 37 million commercial flights estimated around the globe for 2017, the overall rate for fatal airliner accidents ended up at one per roughly 7.4 million flights, according to Harro Ranter, president of the safety network.

By any measure, that made 2017 the safest year ever for airline operations. The group reported 16 total fatal airliner crashes in 2016, with 304 fatalities, and eight fatal accidents excluding intentional acts the year earlier, resulting in 163 deaths.

The latest data also extends to nearly 400 days the stretch without a passenger airline jet accident. According to a chart posted on the safety network’s website, the total number of yearly airliner accidents has been slashed by two-thirds over the past decade.

(Source: Wall Street Journal)