How often do airliners crash?
Serous airline crashes that kill passengers are rare. Since AirSafe began tracking these kinds of events in 1996, there have been as few as seven events with passenger fatalities in 2008, and as many as 19 crashes and other events with passenger fatalities in 1997 . These numbers include deaths due to deliberate actions such as airliner hijackings, or acts of sabotage or terror, and crashes involving small airliners in all parts of the world. Crashes are much less common in the largest industrialized countries. For example, for the five years from 2005 to 2009, AirSafe.com lists 43 crashes and other events that killed at least one airline passenger. Airlines from the US, Canada, the European Community, Australia, and Japan were responsible for about three quarters of all airline traffic, but less than one quarter of the fatal events (9 of 43) took place in those countries or involved an airline based in those countries.
