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Deliberate acts
cause more
airline deaths
than crashes
WASHINGTON (AP) — There
were more airline deaths worldwide due to deliberate acts in
2015 than from accidental air
crashes, for the second year in a
row, according to an industry
tally.
There were only eight accidental airline crashes last year,
accounting for 161 passenger and
crew deaths — the fewest crashes
and deaths since at least 1946.
The tally by Flightglobal, an aviation news and industry data company, excludes a German airliner
that was deliberately flown into a
mountainside in the French Alps
last March, and a Russian airliner
packed with tourists that exploded over Egypt in October. The toll
for those two incidents was 374
killed.
In 2014, the toll from a
Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared and another that was
shot down over Ukraine in 2014
was 537 deaths compared to 436
accident deaths that year.
“In recent years, airline safety
has improved very considerably to
the point where, typically, there
are now very few fatal accidents
and fatalities in a year,” said Paul
Hayes, Flightglobal’s director of
air safety and insurance.
“However, flight security remains
a concern.”
Although some years are better
than others, the fatal accident
rate has been improving for many
years. The global fatal accident
rate for all types of airline operations in 2015 was one per 5 million flights, the best year ever. The
previous best year was 2014, with
a fatal accident rate of 1 per 2.5
million flights. Airline operations
are now about four or five times
safer than they were 20 years ago.
Those tallies are for all types of
airline flights, including cargo,
positioning, training, and maintenance flights. There were just 98
paying passengers killed last year
in accidental crashes compared to
790 in #r