Despite the plane crash in Kazakhstan, 2024 has a good chance of being one of the safest years in the history of modern aviation.
Before the Christmas morning crash, there were 74 fatalities in accidents involving commercial airliners this year, according to the German news agency’s count, which is roughly the same as in 2023 and in the record year of 2017, when, depending on the counting method, there were only around 50 to 80 fatalities worldwide.
The worst accident in 2024 was the crash of an ATR 72 of the Brazilian VoePass Linhas Aéreas, which was on its way from the Brazilian city of Cascavel to the São Paulo-Guarulhos airport in the São Paulo metropolitan region, and then crashed into a residential area. All 62 people on board died, with no casualties on the ground, and problems with the aircraft’s airworthiness are suspected as the cause.
The Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 that crashed on Wednesday morning had around 70 people on board, with reports of around 30 survivors and approximately 40 fatalities, including the two pilots, who allegedly reported issues with the control system of their Embraer ERJ-190AR before the crash.
With a total of around 115 fatalities in commercial airliner accidents in the entire year of 2024, the numbers are very low in comparison to earlier times: In 2020, despite the decline in air traffic due to the corona pandemic, around 300 people died in accidents in civil aviation. In 2019, there were around 280 fatalities, and in 2018, at least 512 people died in crashes of commercial airliners.