Flying got busier in 2022, and it also got a little safer. That is the headline of the International Air Transport Association’s 2022 Safety Report for commercial aviation, released on March 7, 2023, as AeroTime reported. Everything below is IATA’s own accounting of the year.
Start with the traffic. Airlines operated 25% more flights than in 2021, once most governments eased or lifted their COVID-19 travel restrictions. Even so, the total was still 31% below the 2019 level.
More accidents, fewer deadly ones
The raw count of accidents went the wrong way: 39 in 2022 against 29 the year before. The deadly ones went the other way. Five accidents involved fatalities, down from seven in 2021.
IATA put the fatal accident rate at 0.16 per million sectors, an improvement on 0.27 in 2021 and better than the five-year figure of 0.20. By that measure it was the lowest rate of the last five years.
The number of people killed told a harsher story. Fatalities rose from 121 in 2021 to 158 in 2022, and IATA said most of them died on one aircraft. China Eastern flight 5735 crashed in March 2022 and claimed 132 lives. The next worst loss was a Precision Air accident in Tanzania, with 19 deaths.
Three deaths on the ground
In three of the accidents, the people killed were neither passengers nor crew. At Conakry’s Ahmed Sekou Toure International Airport in Guinea, a motorcycle rode onto the runway and hit an aircraft that was landing, killing both people on the bike. At Lima’s Jorge Chavez International Airport, a fire vehicle crossed the runway as an aircraft took off, and two firefighters died. At Montgomery Regional Airport in Alabama, a ground worker was pulled into an engine shortly after the aircraft reached the gate, before both engines were shut down.
The ten-year view
IATA looked back over a decade of data and said overall safety performance had improved by 48%. The all-accident rate stood at 1.21 accidents per million sectors in 2022, compared with 2.31 in 2013. That year, 11 fatal accidents killed 173 people. Over the last five years the industry has averaged around seven fatal accidents a year, with an annual average of 231 fatalities for passenger and cargo aircraft combined.
The association said it will keep working with aviation stakeholders to push the risk of death on a flight lower still.
