Flight safety

Aviation safety is a term encompassing the theory, investigation, and categorization of flight failures, and the prevention of such failures through regulation, education, and training. It can also be applied in the context of campaigns that inform the public as to the safety of air travel.

In 1926 and 1927 there were a total of 24 fatal commercial airline crashes, a further 16 in 1928, and 51 in 1929 (killing 61 people), which remains the worst year on record at an accident rate of about 1 for every 1,000,000 miles (1,600,000 km) flown. Based on the current numbers flying, this would equate to 7,000 fatal incidents per year.

From 310 million passengers in 1970, air transport had grown to 3,696 million in 2016, led by 823 million in the United States then 488 million in China.

In 2016 there has been 19 fatal accidents of civil airliner of more than 14 passengers, resulting in 325 fatalities : the second safest year ever after 2015 with 16 accidents and 2013 with 265 fatalities.

For the ten-year period 2002 to 2011, 0.6 fatal accidents happened per one million flights globally, 0.4 per million hours flown, 22.0 fatalities per one million flights or 12.7 per million hours flown.

In 2016 there has been 34.9 million departures and 75 plane accidents worldwide with 7 of these fatal for 182 fatalities, the lowest since 2013 : 5.21 fatalities per million departures.

Runway safety represents 36% of accidents, Ground Safety 18% and Loss of Control in-Flight 16%.

The main cause is Pilot in Command error. Safety has improved from better aircraft design process, engineering and maintenance, the evolution of navigation aids, and safety protocols and procedures.

There are three main ways in which risk of fatality of a certain mode of travel can be measured: Deaths per billion typical journeys taken, deaths per billion hours traveled, or deaths per billion kilometers traveled. The following table displays these statistics for the United Kingdom 1990–2000. Note that aviation safety does not include the transportation to the airport.

The first two statistics are computed for typical travels for respective forms of transport, so they cannot be used directly to compare risks related to different forms of transport in a particular travel "from A to B". For example: according to statistics, a typical flight from Los Angeles to New York will carry a larger risk factor than a typical car travel from home to office. But a car travel from Los Angeles to New York would not be typical. It would be as large as several dozens of typical car travels, and associated risk will be larger as well. Because the journey would take a much longer time, the overall risk associated by making this journey by car will be higher than making the same journey by air, even if each individual hour of car travel can be less risky than an hour of flight.

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