As originally reported on AP News, the highest factor in airline deaths worldwide in 2015 was deliberate acts, rather than from accidental air crashes. This is the second year in the row that reflects those results.
The data, which was compiled by Flightglobal, did however exclude the Germanwings airline that was deliberately flown into a mountainside in the French Alps last March and the Russian MetroJet A320 which exploded over Egypt last October. Those two incidents had a combined death toll of 374.
For 2015 there were only eight accidental airline crashes, which accounted for 161 passenger and crew deaths. Those numbers are both the fewest accidental crashes and deaths since 1946.
In recent years airline safety has improved, resulting in very few fatal accidents, but there are still some flight security concerns. The global fatal accident rate for all types of airline operations in 2015 was one per 5 million flights, which was the best year ever.
The previous best year was 2014, with a fatal accident rate of 1 per 2.5 million flights. Airline operations are now about four or five times safer than they were 20 years ago. The data includes all types of airline flights, including cargo, positioning, training, and maintenance.
In 2015 there were just 98 paying passengers killed in accidental crashes compared to 790 in 2007. Looking back even further to the 1970s, the annual average of passengers killed in accidental crashes was 1,289.
One major reason attributed for lowering accidental fatalities is better engineering on today’s airliners and aircrafts. The added automation has reduced many common pilot errors and improved satellite-based navigation systems. What planes are constructed of has improved as well, they are made of stronger, lighter weight, less corrosive materials. And they're equipped with safety systems introduced in recent decades, and repeatedly improved over time, that have nearly eliminated mid-air collisions between airliners and controlled flight into terrain.
One issues that is still present is weeding out disturbed pilots and guard against acts of terrorism, experts said. In the case of the Germanwings crash, the pilot Andreas Lubitz managed to conceal his troubles even with airlines and other pilots continually evaluating pilots for signs of trouble.
Terrorism continues to be an issue as well, although security has increased, some manage to get through. Terrorists claimed credit for the bomb that was suspected of blowing apart the MetroJet A320 over Egypt. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by a Russian Buk surface-to-air missile fired from rebel-held territory in Eastern Ukraine, according to Dutch crash investigators.
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