Recent airline crashes run against trend toward safer flying

With plane crashes making headlines over the weekend, one in Florida with no fatalities and another in Russia that killed dozens, travelers might question whether flying has become less safe.

Aviation experts regard the recent incidents as a statistical blip, however, pointing out that such accidents and fatalities are a fraction of what they were as recently as the 1990s.

Advances in aircraft and airport design, better air traffic control, and improved pilot training are often cited as factors in reducing accidents.

"I don't think we'll ever get to zero accidents, but aviation is still the safest it's ever been," said Seth Young, director of the aviation program at Ohio State University.

In the U.S., no airline passengers were killed in accidents from 2009 until April 2018, when a woman on a Southwest Airlines jet died after an engine broke apart in flight.

Worldwide, there were more than 50 fatal airline accidents a year through the early and mid-1990s, claiming well over 1,000 lives annually, according to figures compiled by the Flight Safety Foundation.

Fatalities dropped from 1,844 in 1996 to just 59 in 2017, then rose to 561 last year and 209 already this year.

Nearly half of the airline deaths in 2018 and 2019 occurred during the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max jets in Indonesia and Ethiopia. In each case, investigators are examining the role of flight software that pushed the nose of the plane down based on faulty sensor readings.

That raises concern about safety around automated flight controls, said William Waldock, an expert at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

"Pilots are not being trained as much as pilots as they are system operators and system managers," he said. "So when something happens and the automation fails, they get flummoxed."
"They should be designed to take a lightning strike," Hansman said, "but if you don't have a perfectly grounded airplane, if you don't have the right surge suppressors, it's possible you can take out some of the avionics or electronics."