Hello 2024, a year that began with the Japan Airlines 'miracle' and ended in Korea at its worst

The year 2024 ended in a truly tragic way for aviation, with More than two hundred people lost their lives aboard commercial flights.

And to say that the year had opened, on Jan. 2, with the 'Haneda miracle,' when 379 passengers had been successfully evacuated from an Airbus A350 which, landing at the Tokyo airport had collided with a Dash-8 turboprop of the Japanese Civil Defense.

The Airbus had crawled for hundreds of meters on the runway before coming to a halt on the grass and being enveloped in flames. Nonetheless, only a couple of passengers had suffered minor injuries, sustained just in evacuating the aircraft.

Four days later, Jan. 6, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 lost its left rear emergency exit door minutes after takeoff from Portland.

In that case, too, there were no casualties or even injuries because, as the plane was still climbing, all the passengers had their belts fastened and, as the aircraft was still at low altitude, the decompression, although violent, was not such as to compromise the structural strength of the aircraft. Another stroke of luck was that the tailgate, flying off, it did not hit either the tail rudders or the empennage, which would have compromised the MAX's maneuverability, and the accident ended with an emergency landing without consequences.

The 'Barbone' Matteo Rainisio, then, commented on those two incidents saying. 'guys, we've played all the wild cards here for 2024.' And, even not wishing to attribute to him gifts of clairvoyance, he saw right through it.

The rest of the year passed without any major incidents until the very last days. An Embraer ERJ-190 from Azerbaijan Airlines on Christmas Day., probably hit by shrapnel from an IED dropped by Russian anti-aircraft fire as it was approaching Grozny, ended its tragic flight by crashing a short distance from Aktau Airport in Kazakhstan, on the opposite shore of the Caspian Sea, killing 38 of the 67 people on board.

The following days were a dramatic crescendo: between December 27 and 29 a KLM's Boeing 737-800 made an emergency landing in Oslo ending up off the runway; in Canada a Pal Airlines Dash-8 did likewise in Halifax.

Finally, in Korea a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 ended its desperate emergency landing without landing gear at Muan by crashing into an embankment at the end of the runway, disintegrating with the deaths of 179 of the 181 people on board.

The latter was the world's worst crash in terms of fatalities since the one involving a 737 MAX by Lion Air in 2018, which fell into the Pacific Ocean with 189 people on board, all of whom died.

But there is another incident about which the media have spoken little and which ended in tragedy: it is the one that occurred last Dec. 23 to a Swiss Airbus A220-300 flying between Bucharest and Zurich. Following, it seems, a problem with one of the engines, thehe passenger cabin and cockpit of the A220 filled with smoke, forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing in Graz, Austria.

Twelve passengers ended up in the hospital for investigation and later discharged. Things were much worse for three flight attendants: one of them, who was admitted to intensive care, did not make it and passed away on Dec. 30.

The total number of fatalities in these last three accidents (which have different causes from each other) equals (more or less) that of all deaths recorded in 2023, which was the least 'mournful' year in aviation history, with 229 deaths in 82 accidents, according to data collected by the Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives, a nongovernmental organization based in Geneva, Switzerland..

However, security trend remains extremely positive, if we consider that in the ten years Between 2015 and 2024, more than 1,000 deaths directly or indirectly related to aviation occurred in 2018 alone. With the first 737max crash, that of Lion Air costing 189 people their lives.

A statistic that makes it clear how safe flying is today if one compares it with that, albeit recent, decade between 1994 and 2003, when there were far more than a thousand victims a year each year.

Or to the numbers of the decade between 1970 and 1980 when deaths were always more than two thousand a year, with a peak of 3,300 in 1972. In sum, over five decades, the average number of annual fatalities has been reduced to less than one-fifth of what it was in 1970.

The whole with a dramatic increase over these 50 years in the number of flights flown and passengers carried each year: from less than 500 million in 1970 to about 4.5 billion in 2019.