Despite the Mayaysia Airlines Fiasco, Air Safety Reaches New Highs

The global accident rate for airline flights in 2013 was the lowest on record, according to an international standard-setting group, underscoring a steady improvement in airline safety despite recent attention on the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. 

The overall crash rate for scheduled commercial flights in 2013 dropped to 2.8 accidents per 1 million departures world-wide, a 13% drop from 2012 and at least a 30% decrease from rates recorded during each of the seven years before that, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization, the air-safety arm of the United Nations. The preliminary results were "the lowest recorded since it began tracking the global accident rate" decades ago, the organization said.

Coming after years of record-low fatalities globally, the latest report reflects how stepped-up international cooperation, enhanced collection of data and improved pilot training have yielded broad safety gains. Even when there were fatal accidents around the world in 2013, the total number of deaths dropped to 173 from 388 a year earlier. Since 2009, total world-wide fatalities dropped by more than two-thirds.

If investigators are able to unravel why the Malaysian Boeing 777 veered sharply off course, airline officials say the event is likely to put only a temporary blemish on the industry's safety record. It will be just "another strange but eventually explained incident," according to Tony Tyler, chief executive of the International Air Transport Association, the industry's main global trade group.

In the U.S., the statistics are even better. Over five years ending April, American carriers flew some 3.7 billion passengers, or roughly 10 times the U.S. population, "without so much as putting a scratch on anyone" who was a passenger, Nicholas Sabatini, a former head of safety at the Federal Aviation Administration, told CNN last weekend.

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