Despite huge growth in aviation and increased air traffic in the last few decades, 2007 proved the safest year in terms of air accidents since 1963.
The Aircraft Crashes Record Office (ACRO) said there were 136 accidents last year, 28 less than in 2006, and the lowest number in a single year for nearly half a century. Of these, 33 were during scheduled commercial flights, 17 during charter flights, and the remainder on services including cargo, ambulance, surveillance and humanitarian flights.
ACRO defines an ”accident” to be when an aircraft is damaged so badly it is consequently written off, and not determined by fatalities ” but the number of lives lost was 25% lower than in 2006 - one of the lowest for many years.
Considering there has been a 3% increase from 2006 in global passengers to 2.2bn, it is a fillip for the industry.
”It”s very good news of course but it”s not surprising,” said ACRO manager Ronan Hubert. ”The most important thing to understand is people in aviation should take this opportunity to ensure aviation is a safe mode of transport. The CAA, operators, maintenance companies, pilots, all private companies involved ” they have to take care of safety, and understand that if there are accidents operators won”t stay in business.
”They have to be very, very careful about safety or they”ll go bankrupt. All these people have taken this into consideration and today we can say the level of safety in developed countries is very high.”
Most incidents were reported in North America (34), while no major accident occurred in Europe.
”In North America there is a larger number of aircraft and the traffic is huge, so this is normal,” said Hubert. ”But of course, most of the airplanes involved in these accidents are light and mid-sized aircraft rather than jumbos. In fact most of these accidents worldwide are concerning these kinds of smaller aircraft.”
A spokeswoman for the International Air Carrier Association told ABTN: ”These new figures are a welcome reflection of a fully deregulated sector which is continuing to keep costs to a minimum while providing the highest standards of safety.”
The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said it will be releasing its own report later on this year using data from a variety of sources.
”Aviation safety in Europe is high ” our 2006 report showed the lowest number of accidents involving fixed wing aircraft in public transport within the decade,” said EASA head of communications, Daniel Hoeltgen.
”But it is not acceptable to rest on our laurels, indeed we believe more needs to be done to keep levels of safety as high as they are, because of the increase of traffic, and also to cater for future trends in aviation which we believe will see an increase of very light jet traffic.
”This is why we have launched the European Strategic Safety Initiative, a voluntary drive to increase cooperation between operators, authorities and manufacturers to exchange information to enhance aviation safety globally.”