Airline Safety Review – 2005

23rd January, 2006

Airline safety in 2005 took a step backwards to the late 20th century in terms of the number of fatal accidents and resulting passenger and crew deaths worldwide. It was a disappointing 12 months given the outstanding safety performance in the previous two years.

---

See extract of article from Flight International below.Important note. This review covers all accidents and deaths, ie affecting passengers as well as people on the ground. But the trend is important in respect of ‘third party safety’ – if the trend of accidents and deaths overall is upword, the trend for injuries and deaths on the ground is likely to be upward too.”Airline safety in 2005 took a step backwards to the late 20th century in terms of the number of fatal accidents and resulting passenger and crew deaths worldwide. It was a disappointing 12 months given the outstanding safety performance in the previous two years.The Flight Safety Foundation’s (FSF) technical programmes director Jim Burin assesses 2005 as an “average” year, observing that “the historic leading killers in aviation – CFIT [controlled flight into terrain] and loss of control – have made an unwelcome comeback, resulting in a higher number of fatalities than we have seen recently”. More optimistically, given the FSF’s year of work on the approach and landing accident reduction (ALAR) programme, he adds: “We are showing signs of reducing the risk of approach and landing accidents, although we need to ensure this is a trend and not a one-year event.”Until 2004 the figures for fatal accidents, fatalities and hull losses had all shown a consistent decline (see bar chart), but 2005 has, at least temporarily, reversed that, showing 34 accidents and 1,050 fatalities. These figures, however, are close to or slightly better than the annual averages for the past 10 years (see chart).” [For charts see the full Flight International article – link below.Flight International article