We found this to be a compelling and useful article for our fellow travelers in the December 28th issue of the Wall Street Journal. Despite many airlines adding more flights, 2011 held the record for being one of the safest years to fly.
"Airlines on Track for Safety Record". Michaels, Daniel. Wall Street Journal. 12/28/2011.
This year is on course to be the safest ever for modern commercial aviation.
With only days left, 2011 is posed to eclipse the postwar record low rate of passenger fatalities with roughly one passenger death for every 7.1 million air travelers world-wide, according to Ascend, a consulting firm in London. But the improving statistics mask lingering dangers, according to safety experts.
This year also appears set to end with among the lowest total number of passenger deaths, at 401 to date, despite a sharp rise recently in the number of flights and passengers world-wide. In 2004, 344 passengers died in commercial-aviation accidents, but the industry carried 30% fewer passengers on far fewer flights, according to Ascend. The figures exclude acts of terrorism.
"Safety is improving and it's improving faster than the industry is expanding," said Paul Hayes, director of safety at Ascend.
The record is best for carriers flying Western-built planes. This year, they have experienced one major crash per three million flights world-wide, a roughly 49% better rate than in 2010 and roughly three times better than 2001, according to International Air Transport Association, a global trade group. The figure represents the industry's best performance since IATA began collecting crash records in the 1940s.
Since Oct. 13, when a propeller-plane crash in Papua New Guinea killed 28 passengers, nobody has died in an airliner, which is generally defined as a commercial, multi-engine airplane carrying 14 or more passengers.
That marks another notable record: the longest period in modern aviation without a single fatal airliner accident, according to Harro Ranter, president of the Aviation Safety Network, a non-profit organization that tracks accidents and incidents. The longest previous such period was 61 days, in 1985, Mr. Ranter says.
While the year's records are noteworthy, they don't guarantee future safety - and could even undermine it by breeding complacency, warned Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, a global advocacy organization. "We have such a fantastic record," improving safety globally that airlines and governments are tempted to say, "look how well we have fixed it, we're done now," he said.
Some safety yardsticks have not improved in years, while recent incidents have exposed areas that need work: safety on the ground at airports, the training of pilots to handle sophisticated computers, and greater awareness of flight hazards in some developing countries.
Most aviation fatalities in 2011 occurred in Russia, Iran and African countries that have long faced air-safety problems, such as Angola and Congo.
The major accident rate in North America for example has remained flat at about one in 10 million flights, while in Africa the rate is roughly 40 times greater, according to IATA. But African aviation is generally less dangerous than a few years ago, thanks to concerted efforts by local aviation officials and international regulators.
In more-developed countries, ground accidents seem stubbornly resistant to stepped-up safety efforts by industry and regulators. Planes running off runways continue to be the most common hazard, totaling almost one-fourth of all crashes involving Western-built jets, although they account for a much smaller proportion of deaths.
Causes include pilots descending without proper preparations for landing and crews failing to properly enter data or monitor flight computers.
Rarer but far more severe are so-called "loss of control accidents," when a functioning aircraft suddenly makes a catastrophic maneuver, according to Ilias Maragakis, an analyst at the European Union's European Aviation Safety Agency. At a conference EASA held in October about the phenomenon, he had no single factor is to blame. One response from regulators has been to require increasingly realistic training in simulators, including teaching high-altitude stall recovery techniques.
Another major safety threat stems from pilots who become confused by cockpit computers or who rely on automation too much. Such pilots can get into fatal difficulties when they are forced to revert to manual flying skills in an emergency.
The increasing computerization of jetliners and similar big changes to flying mean "we need to admit that fundamental changes need to occur," including how pilots are recruited, trained and tested, Mr. Voss told an international safety conference in Singapore last month.
That shift is one of many that safety experts say are necessary to further reduce accidents. Historically, improvements have come largely from better equipment and pilot training.
Experts believe that in the future, however, the biggest advances will come primarily from analyzing huge volumes of data about a broad array of incidents, culled from multiple carriers across the globe.
The technique "allows us to find that rare, high-risk event that a single carrier" could never identify or counter by itself, according to Ken Hylander, the top safety official at Delta Air Lines Inc. and the head of a joint FAA-industry safety team.
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