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WASHINGTON (REUTERS) – The number of people who died in large commercial aircraft crashes rose in 2020 to 299 worldwide, even as the number of crashes fell by more than 50 percent, a Dutch consulting firm said Friday ( January 1).
Aviation consultancy To70 said that in 2020, there were 40 accidents involving large commercial passenger planes, five of which were fatal, resulting in 299 deaths. In 2019, there were 86 accidents, eight of which were fatal, resulting in 257 deaths.
Large commercial jets had 0.27 fatal accidents per million flights in 2020, To70 said, or one fatal accident every 3.7 million flights, up from 0.18 fatal accidents per million flights in 2019.
The decline in accidents came amid a sharp decline in flights due to the coronavirus pandemic. Flightradar24 reported that the commercial flights it tracked around the world in 2020 fell 42 percent to 24.4 million.
More than half of all deaths in the To70 review were due to the 176 people who died in January 2020 when a Ukrainian plane was shot down in Iranian airspace.
The second deadliest incident was the May accident of a Pakistani airliner, which killed 98 people.
Almost all airline travelers use large passenger aircraft covered by the statistics, but exclude small passenger aircraft in service.
Over the past two decades, aviation deaths have dropped dramatically. As recently as 2005, there were 1,015 fatalities aboard commercial passenger flights worldwide, the Aviation Safety Network (ASN) said.
In the past five years, there have been an average of 14 fatal accidents for commercial passenger and cargo aircraft, resulting in 345 deaths a year, ASN said.
In 2017, aviation had its safest year on record in the world, with only two fatal accidents involving regional turboprops resulting in 13 fatalities and no fatal airliner crashes.
The United States has not had a fatal US passenger airline accident since February 2009 and one death due to a US passenger airline accident in that period.
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