Air deaths tally shows 2010 upsurge in accidents

By Karl Morgenstern Jan 11, 2011, 15:48 GMT

   Hamburg - A total of 829 people were killed in aeroplane crashes around the world last year, a tally complied by a German agency showed Tuesday, an increase on the previous two years.

The latest figure compares with 766 deaths in 2009 and 598 in 2008, according to the Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Center (JACDEC), a private agency based in Hamburg which gathers its data from aviation safety agencies round the globe.

Of the 49 accidents recorded last year, none involved fatalities in Europe or North America. By contrast, the most dangerous places in which to fly were Pakistan and India.

A report by Aero International, a magazine which publishes the JACDEC data, said it was notable that acts of terrorism had not played any role in accidents last year.

The tally only concerns crashes involving civilian airliners, not private or military planes. It therefore does not include the Polish Air Force plane crash of April 10 near Smolensk, Russia, in which 96 people, including Polish president Lech Kaczynski, died.

Nor does it include people on the ground killed by falling debris or planes.

Despite last year's rise, long-term data shows that flying today is much safer than in the 1980s and 1990s, when the annual death toll was in the region of 1,100 to 1,400. Air-passenger traffic has since increased significantly.

One of the worst records was set in 1996, when a total of 2,272 people died.

   Guenther Matschnigg, a longtime vice-president of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), once said: 'A passenger using an airliner once a day would have to live on average for 4,807 years before he would be involved in a crash.'

The latest data confirms that flying is more dangerous in less affluent regions and in countries with weaker infrastructure.

One of the worst accidents of 2010 took place on May 22, when a Boeing 737 operated by Air India Express crashed at Bangalore Airport, killing 158 occupants. There were eight survivors. The plane had touched down too far along the runway, and an attempt to abort the landing came too late to avert disaster.

On July 28, North of Islamabad, a 10-year-old Airbus A321 operated by Airblue crashed into a spur of the Margalla hills in Pakistan during an attempt to land in a storm, killing 145 passengers and six crew.

The pilot had aborted the first attempt at landing and strayed from the proper flight path during his second approach.

An Airbus A330-300 that had been acquired new by Afriqiyah Airways crashed on May 12 just outside Tripoli Airport in Libya.

Visibility was restricted by sand and haze as the two-engined plane arrived from Johannesburg, and Tripoli's lack of an instrument landing system (ILS) meant the pilot had no image of the runway on his monitor. The crash killed 101. A 9-year-old boy was the sole survivor.

   Aero International noted that in all three of the year's most serious crashes, 'the causal scenario was roughly the same, with human error indicated.'

Commenting on the Bangalore crash, it said many analysts agreed that India's air-transport infrastructure was on the point of choking as traffic soared.

At 181, Pakistan had the highest national death toll in 2010.