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Aviation History
1989
1989 - 0163.PDF
1988: bad for scheduleds Last year the world's airlines suffered many more accidents than usual, and the highest-ever number of people died as a result of various forms of attack against civil airliners. Set against this are the facts that the number of deaths in unprovoked crashes is unremarkable, and that the number of air travellers has grown. There were 15 unprovoked fatal accidents to scheduled passenger air services last year, and 633 people died in them. That was a sad result for a category which normally has a record closer to that shown in the 1957 figures—six accidents and 341 fatalities. The average number of deaths in unprovoked accidents of all categories each year this decade has been 993. The total number of fatalities this year has been 1,007. During that, time, however, the annual number of passenger journeys has increased from about 750 million to more than 1,100 million, and the average journey distance has also increased. The mathematical conclu sion, therefore, is that flight safety continues to improve, although that is of little comfort to those whose lives have been disrupted by an airline accident. As is usual, analysis of the causes of acci dents in 1988 shows "aircrew error" to be the single most common cause. This category David Learmount makes the first in-depth appraisal of airline safety and security for 1988. encompasses, however, far more than mishandling of the aircraft, including as it does incidents in which the crew might have made faulty judgements on weather condi tions, or failed to cope with a minor emergency. Although weather-related acci dents caused the next largest number of fatal ities in 1988, provoked incidents accounted for nearly as many. The crash of the sabotaged Pan American 747 on Lockerbie, Scotland, was Britain's worst aviation accident Three 1988 events in particular have captured the world's attention as it watched the airline scene. Two were terrorist acts. The first was the painfully long-drawn-out Kuwait Airways hijack, in which two passengers were murdered. The other was the destruction of a Boeing 747 and 259 human beings in Scotland's skies, which caused some 15 deaths on the ground as well. Two years ago these events would not have been included in this Flight survey, because they were not a matter of flight safety. Now we include them on the grounds that successful airport and airline security is (unfortunately) as fundamental to safe oper ations as correct maintenance of aircraft and runways. It was a major shock when the USA's Total Year 19S8 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 *Figures for this table. Total fatalities 1,007 834 607 1,800 451 1,202 1,012 710 1,329 accidents involving Fatalities and Accidents in this decade* Total accidents 54 28 31 39 29 34 33 29 44 deaths from sabotag Non-Soviet fatalities 943 695 529 1,564 251 1,160 773 461 1,045 e, hijack, or -bloc nations accidents 49 25 28 \33 J 27 '31 J8 26 37 militarv action against Soviet-bloc fatalities 64? 183? 78? 236? 200? 42? 239? 249? 284? civi! targets nations are accidents 5? 2? 3? 6? 2? 3? 5? 3? 7? not included in FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL, 21 January 1989 49
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