Why no one has died in a commercial passenger jet crash in over a year
Air travel has become incredibly safe.
By Rob Verger
Not a single person perished in a commercial passenger jet crash in 2017, making the year an extraordinarily safe one for flying. New reports from two separate organizations in the Netherlands summarize just how incredibly safe it was to take to the skies commercially, and aviation experts say that the recent streak is simply a part of trend going back years (so feel free to ignore that tweet from the President claiming it’s his doing.)
While flying by commercial passenger jet was fatality-free globally, the industry did suffer minimal losses. By one count, from the Aviation Safety Network, there were ten accidents involving commercial passenger or cargo airplanes, claiming 44 lives in 2017. (That organization focuses on crashes involving commercial planes, cargo or passenger, meant to carry 14 or more people; it didn’t include the 35 lives lost on the ground during a cargo plane accident in Kyrgyzstan.) By another count, from a Dutch firm called To70, 14 people were killed in aviation accidents in 2017. They focused just on commercial passenger planes heavier than 12,566 pounds at takeoff.
And it’s been a record-breaking 400-plus days since the last commercial passenger…
