Airline travel is getting safer, crash toll shows (News Feature)

Jan 3, 2008, 2:56 GMT

Hamburg - Air travel really is getting safer, with a marked drop in the number of crashes round the world, a year-end survey by a German aviation magazine, Aero International, shows.

The trend is most marked in Europe, North America, East Asia and Australia, which have become largely accident free.

Last year's world civil aviation crash toll was 751 lives, down 14

per cent from 2006, when 876 were killed.

The average annual tolls of about 1,200 killed in the 1980s and 1990s seem to be a thing of the past, despite civilian air traffic having tripled in volume since 1984. The stand-out years in that period were 1985 (1,801 deaths) and 1996 (2,272 killed).

Aero International said it was still not time for smiles however, with insurers reporting a significant rise in incidents where the occupants are unscathed but the plane is a write-off.

These are known as hull losses, meaning the aircraft is not worth repairing and the owner claims its value from the insurer.

There were 52 of them last year, on average one per week, including a brand-new Airbus A340-600 set for delivery to Etihad Airways jumping out of its restraint during engine testing on the ground at Toulouse and slamming into a wall.

The 180-million-dollar airframe was smashed and 10 people were injured. JLT Aerospace, a leading analyst of aviation insurance business, computed the value of all hull losses last year at 500 million dollars.

Last year's five worst fatal crashes were:

An Airbus A320 operated by TAM of Brazil overran the runway while landing during rain in Sao Paulo, Brazil on July 17, 2007 and crashed at high speed into a warehouse. All 187 occupants and 12 people on the ground were killed.

The pilots had not properly deployed the spoilers, or flaps on the tops of the wings to make a plane slow down.

On May 4, a 7-month-old Boeing 737-800 operated by Kenya Airways crashed at Doula in Cameroon, killing all 114 occupants.

The January 1 crash into the sea of an Adam Air Boeing 737-300 left no survivors. The Indonesian plane plunged into the Makassar Strait after passing through stormy weather. The toll: 102.

An MD-82 flying from Bangkok crashed in wind and rain after attempting to land at Phuket International Airport, Thailand and burned. The One-Two-Go Airlines jet skidded into an embankment and only 34 of the 130 occupants survived the September 16 crash.

An MD-83 operated by Atlas Jet slammed into a mountain in Turkey on November 3, killing all 57 on board. Investigators believe it was flying too low and had strayed from its flight path.

Brazil's air safety had been heavily criticised in previous years, but the year's mishaps have put an especial spotlight this time round on Indonesia, where three jets crashed in the first three months alone with a total loss of 123 lives.

'After various safety lapses became evident, every single Indonesian airline was put on the European Union blacklist, meaning they could not land in Europe,' Aero International observed.

European aviation safety regulators have offered Jakarta help to tighten up safety surveillance, just as they helped Taiwan and South Korea in the late 1990s after serious lapses in their standards.

Europe's principal airlines made it through the year without any fatal crashes, but were not entirely accident free.

Three DHC-8-Q400 turbo-prop planes operated by SAS suffered undercarriage failures during landing. The Scandinavian company responded by grounding all its planes of the type.

A Fokker 100 operated by an Air France subsidiary crashed while attempting to take off from Pau airport in south-western France, hitting a truck and killing its driver, but all the occupants survived.

There was improvement elsewhere too. Two nations with bad accident records, Nigeria and Iran, made it through the year without any fatal crashes. Russia's air death toll was also markedly down last year.