In 2018, airlines set an record by flying nearly 4.5 billion passengers on nearly 45 million flights worldwide. On the surface, things were fine.
But 2018 has only been an average year for safety in airline travel, as per the retired airline pilot and safety expert John Cox, writing in USA Today.
Worryingly in 2018, the 555 airline passengers died in plane accidents which is the highest in the last five years since 2014, when 692 passengers died.
According to ASN,There was a total of 15 fatal airliner accidents in 2018.
The worst accident was occurred when a Lion Air crash in Jakarta, Indonesia. This crash killed all 189 people on board the Lion Air flight. It opened a discussion on the safety of Boeing Max and resulted in a number of cancelled order for the U.S. plane manufacturer. Lion Air also cancelled all its remaining Boeing Max orders.
Human error was blamed for a plane crash in Cuba that killed 112 people in July. Another fatal crash occurred when a plane was landing at Nepal’s Kathmandu airport in March, killing 51 people.
Saratov Airlines Flight 703 crashed in February just outside Moscow, killing all 71 people on board the passenger flight.
In 2018,the number of deaths are more than 900% increase over last year when just 59 people died in accidents. That led ASN to call 2017 “the safest year ever, both by the number of fatal accidents as well as in terms of fatalities.”
