Even if at the beginning of 2024 the collision between two Airplanes at Haneda Airport in Japan and the incident on board one Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 Max hit the headlines, the number of fatal accidents in air traffic has been steadily declining.
“2023 was one of the safest years in the history of commercial civil aviation,” reports the Federal Association of the German Aviation Industry (BDL). The organization relies on the evaluation of the Hamburg-based Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Center (Jacdec), which recorded a total of 1,001 accidents and incidents for the past year.
“In 45 aircraft total losses, 124 people died. That was 109 fewer than in the previous year and 233 fewer than the average of the last ten years (357),” is Jacdec’s conclusion.
72 victims alone were killed in a propeller plane crash Yeti Airlines on January 15, 2023 on the final approach to Pokhara airport in Nepal.
Flying is becoming increasingly safer
The UN aviation organization ICAO estimates that around 4.6 billion passengers were transported last year. This means the risk of dying in a plane accident is 1 in 57,750,000. For comparison: In the 1970s, the probability was statistically 1 in 264,000. This makes air travel 218 times safer, argues the BDL.
At the beginning of the year, the aircraft accident office Jacdec updates the statistics with the safest airlines based on the previous year’s figures, with the accident history based on incidents and crashes over the past 30 years. The influence of such an accident on the evaluation decreases the longer the event took place. This rewards airlines with years of accident-free flight operations. In addition to environmental influences such as infrastructure and operational factors such as the average fleet age, the traffic performance of the respective airline is also taken into account. Last year’s winner Etihad Airlines is no longer listed in the most recent data evaluation because the airline is no longer considered one of the 25 largest.
In the photo series we present the 13 safest airlines among the 25 largest airlines in the world in 2023. You can find a detailed evaluation of the Jacdec ranking in the February issue of the magazine “Aero International”(https://www.aerointernational.de), which will be published on January 12th.
Sources: Jacdec, BDL, Aero International
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