According to Top70 reports

The past year has been another exceptionally good year for civil aviation safety. With only two fatal accidents to passenger airliners, both involving small turbo-prop planes, 2017 was much better than could reasonably (and statistically) be expected, and was again better than last year’s remarkable performance.

However, the risks to civil aviation do remain high, as the seriousness of some of the non-fatal accidents shows

Airlines recorded zero accident deaths in commercial passenger jets last year, according to a Dutch consulting firm and an aviation safety group that tracks crashes, making 2017 the safest year on record for commercial air travel.

2017 IN REVIEW

Our to70 Civil Aviation Safety Review examines accidents only to larger passenger aircraft commonly used by most travellers. (See our criteria in the Note below.) We include all causes, whether technical failure, human error or unlawful interference. In 2016, there were 71 civil aviation accidents of which six resulted in fatalities. This year, 2017, the number is even lower; 111 accidents, two of which included fatalities. There were no accidents in 2017 related to unlawful interference. A total of 13 lives lost in two regional airline accidents:

• An Embraer Brasilia[1] lost control in flight in Angola after, reportedly, suffering an engine failure, and
• A Czech-built Let 410[2] crashed on landing at Nelken in Russia.

An estimated three percent growth in air traffic for 2017 over 2016 means that the fatal accident rate for large aeroplane in commercial air transport is again reduced; this time to 0.06 fatal accidents per million flights. That is a rate of one fatal accident for every 16 million flights.

With so few fatal accidents to examine, it is worth remembering that there were also several qute serious non-fatal accidents in 2017. A number of engine related accidents occurred, including the spectacular loss of the engine inlet fan and cowling on an Air France A380[3]. That the aeroplane continued to operate safely to a diversion airport and was then flown home for repair on three engines says a lot about the robustness of the aeroplane. In addition to the non-fatal accidents, there are a number of notable events that have been excluded from the statistics. Examples of these accidents include:

In comparison, there were 16 accidents and 303 deaths in 2016 among airliners.

The deadliest incident last year occurred in January when a Turkish cargo jet smashed into a village in Kyrgyzstan as it tried to land at a nearby airport in dense fog, killing 35 on the ground and all four onboard.

The Aviation Safety Network said 2017 was “the safest year ever, both by the number of fatal accidents as well as in terms of fatalities.”

Over the last two decades aviation deaths around the world have been steadily falling. As recently as 2005, there were 1,015 deaths aboard commercial passenger flights worldwide, the Aviation Safety Network said.

The United States last recorded a fatal airline passenger jet crash in February 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed short of the runway in Clarence Center, New York, killing 49 onboard and one person on the ground.

In 2016, 412 people were killed in the United States in aviation accidents – nearly all in general aviation accidents and none on commercial passenger airlines.

The last fatal passenger jet airliner accident worldwide took place in November 2016 near Medellin, Colombia and the last commercial passenger aircraft crash to kill more than 100 people occurred in October 2015 in Egypt.