Many accidents and crises… 2024 is one of the worst years for air travel in history

The year 2024 will conclude as one of the worst years for air travel with a large number of plane accidents, which has increased anxiety and fears about air travel and threatens to decline the profits of air carriers, according to what the American CNN network reported.

3 fatal weather accidents in a week

Three separate incidents that occurred in about a week have renewed concerns in the global aviation sector, the most recent of which were plane crashes in South Korea, Canada, and Azerbaijan.
However, statistics show that the risk of death or injury on commercial flights is still low.

South Korean plane crash

The latest incident occurred on Sunday in South Korea when a Boeing passenger plane crashed while landing at Muan International Airport, killing 179 people, making it the country’s deadliest aviation disaster since 1997.
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The cause of the accident is not yet clear, although experts told CNN that the plane’s wheels, specifically, did not fully open before it hit the runway. South Korean authorities are investigating the cause of the disaster with the help of investigators from the United States.
In a statement issued on Sunday on the X platform, Boeing offered its “deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones” and said it was ready to support Jeju Aviation.

Azerbaijani plane accident

The accident involving the South Korean plane came after 38 people were killed on Christmas Day when an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed after entering Russian airspace in Grozny, Chechnya.
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The cause of the accident was not confirmed, but Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev accused Russia of shooting down the plane by mistake.
A Kremlin statement said that Russian President Vladimir Putin “apologized for the tragic incident occurring in Russian airspace” in a phone call with Aliyev.

Air Canada crisis

Before that, there was an incident on an Air Canada Express flight in which the aircraft, operated by partner airline PAL and carrying 73 passengers, experienced a “suspected landing gear problem” after arriving at Halifax-Stanfield International Airport in Nova Scotia, although no incidents were reported. Injuries, according to the airline.

Bad year for air travel

These incidents concluded a year that was not positive for the aviation industry, especially the struggling aircraft manufacturer Boeing, which faced increasing criticism over the quality of its products.
In January, an Alaska Airlines plane had a problem that left a large hole in the side of the fuselage of a Boeing 737 MAX.
No passengers died, but the incident follows two fatal 737 MAX crashes in recent years — one in 2018 and another in 2019 — that led to a 20-month grounding of the model worldwide.

Risks of aviation accidents

According to the latest data from the International Air Transport Association, the trade association for the world’s airlines, accidents – fatal or otherwise – on tens of millions of commercial flights each year are highly unlikely.
There were 30 such accidents recorded in 2023, the most recent year for which full annual accident data is available, equivalent to a risk of one accident for every 1.26 million flights, according to the International Air Transport Association.

Air travel safety safety

“You’re at greater risk driving to the airport than flying and in some parts of the world you’re less safe on an escalator than flying,” said Anthony Brickhouse, a professor of aviation safety at Embry-Riddle University in New Jersey.
A study on aviation safety published in August and co-authored by Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that the risk of death per boarding a plane from 2018 to 2022 was one in 13.7 million.
In other words, if you chose a random flight and boarded it in that time period, your chances of dying in a plane crash or act of terrorism are close to one in 14 million.
But a strong safety record in the past is no guarantee of the same in the future, and travelers may have new concerns in light of the recent spate of fatal accidents. The loss of more than 200 lives in the past few days alone will push the number of deaths resulting from commercial aviation accidents well above 72 cases. Death recorded in 2023.

Decline in the aviation sector

Analysis casts further doubt on the airline industry’s claim that increased flights boost the economy. New Economics found that business flights fell by 29% in 2023 compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019, with the number of flights falling by 3.9 million. a trip.
Research has shown that business use of air travel has collapsed in the past decade and despite massive growth in passenger numbers between 2015 and 2019, business passenger market share in 2022 was half what it was in 2013.