More Fatal Plane Crashes Despite Drop in Flights

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

(Worthy News) – More people were killed in plane crashes last year than in 2019 despite a massive drop in fights due to the coronavirus pandemic, a Dutch aviation consultancy firm says.

To70 revealed on New Year’s Day that the death toll of aviation tragedies rose from 257 in 2019 to 299 in 2020.

There were 40 accidents involving large commercial passenger aircraft, five of which were fatal, last year. But in 2019, nearly double the number of casualties – 86 – eight of which deadly, according to figures released by To70.

Large commercial airplanes had 0.27 fatal accidents per million flights in 2020, To70 said, or one fatal crash every 3.7m flights. That is up from 0.18 fatal accidents per million flights in 2019.

Airlines drastically cut the number of flights they operated in 2020 as the pandemic took hold. The Flightradar24 monitoring service said commercial flights it tracked worldwide in 2020 dropped 42 percent to 24.4 million.

More than half of all deaths in the To70 review were the 176 people killed in January 2020 when a Ukrainian plane was shot down in Iranian airspace.

The second deadliest incident was the crash of a Pakistan airliner in May, in which 98 people died.

While serious, over the past two decades, aviation deaths have fallen dramatically. As recently as 2005, there were 1,015 deaths aboard commercial passenger flights worldwide, the Aviation Safety Network (ASN) said. Over the past five years, there was an average of 14 fatal accidents for commercial passenger and cargo planes resulting in 345 deaths annually, Reuters news agency cited ASN as saying.

In 2017, aviation had its safest year on record worldwide with ‘only’ two fatal accidents involving regional turboprops that resulted in 13 deaths and no deadly crashes of passenger jets. The United States has not had a deadly US passenger airline crash since February 2009.

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