According to IATA, 2023 was the safest year to fly
Traveling by air is getting safer and safer, and 2023 was the best year to fly since aviation has existed [...]
Traveling by air is getting safer and 2023 was the best year to fly since commercial aviation has existed.
In this article:
Saying this is not us at TFC-who, as we know, would gladly live in a pressurized cabin at 35,000 feet-but the IATA, the International Air Transport Association, which a few days ago released a report on the recently completed year.
Let's look at some data. The organization, in the report, writes that last year the following were recorded. 37 million flights for a total 4.3 billion passengers carried around the world. The incidents - mortal and not - were 30 (it was 42 in 2022), i.e. 0.8 per million takeoffs; to find the previous lowest figure ever we have to go back to 2017, which recorded 1.06 accidents per million takeoffs.
As for, however, air disasters with fatalities related to the year 2023 there is only the one involving Yeti Airlines: On January 15, 2023, in Nepal, an Atr 72-500 on landing crashed (due to human error) causing the death of 72 people, including passengers and crew members. A single fatal accident recorded in '23 brought, therefore, the risk rate to 0.03 per million flights: this is the lowest value ever which beats the previous record value of 0.005 dating back to 2015 by no small margin.
More specifically, geographically, there are 7 out of 8 macro areas with zero fatal accident rates in 2023, and they are North America, Central and South America, Europe and Africa, but also the Middle East, North Africa, Russia and North Asia; the carnage in Nepal, as can be guessed, brings The fatal accident rate at 0.16 in in the Asia-Pacific region..
Regarding thehall loss, that is, the total loss of the aircraft-a very important item for insiders-. it goes from 0.4 in 2022 to 0.05 per million takeoffs in 2023: only 2 aircraft were declared unrepairable.
Certainly the 2024 figure will be affected by two incidents: what affected Japan Airlines' Airbus A350 destroyed after colliding with a turboprop at Tokyo-Haneda airport and that of the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 that lost a panel shortly after takeoff.
"The 2023 safety performance continues to demonstrate that flying is the safest mode of transportation. Aviation places the highest priority on safety and this is reflected in 2023 performance, which also saw the lowest fatality risk and accident rate ever recorded." Willie Walsh, director general of IATA, said, adding. "a single fatal turboprop accident with 72 fatalities, however, reminds us that we can never take safety for granted. And two high-profile accidents in the first month of 2024 show that even though flying is among the safest activities, there is always room for improvement."
It is factual: Flying is always safer. Statistically speaking, numbers in hand, a person would have to take a plane every day for more than 103,000 years before losing his life in an accident: but fortunately one passes away well before that for anagraphic reasons....
