Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Have There Been More Air Accidents Recently?

No. According to the Aircraft Crashes Record Office (the international record-keeper for these statistics), the number of air accidents recently (at least in 2008) is the same or lower as the average for the last ten years:

YearAccidents
2000
190
2001
200
2002
180
2003
198
2004
165
2005
184
2006
165
2007
139
2008
149


Note that these are acccidents, not deaths, although the death trend is similar. It would be a little more scientific to look at accidents per flight. Fine; the number of flights per year from 2007 to now is going to be basically flat, or maybe even slightly lower owing to the recession.

Originally I was going to post something investigating a possible relationship between the recession and the uptick in accident, but I can't do that because there is no uptick. It certainly seems like there have been more accidents, or I wouldn't have asked the question(and "more plane crashes lately" wouldn't pop right up in the Google search box). Maybe there have been more in the developed world or in the U.S.? The FAA doesn't have statistics for 2009 yet, so instead I went to planecrashinfo.com's database. Their overall-accident statistics are lower than ARCO's by a factor of 2.4 (on average for the period 2000-2008) but we can still see a trend, if there is one:


YearAccidents, WorldIndustrialized WorldU.S. Accidents
2000
76
34
14
2001
70
35
17
2002
75
30
11
2003
61
23
10
2004
61
24
14
2005
51
15
6
2006
49
16
6
2007
64
15
7
2008
62
23
13
2009
52
21
9


For the 2009 figures, I extrapolated events through 3 June (22, 9, and 4 resp.) out to a 365-day year. "Industrialized world" was all accidents in Australia, British Virgin Islands, Canada, France, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macedonia, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK and the US.


Still no clear trend. What could be at the root of this sense of more crashes? More mediagenic crashes, which could mean crashes with more fatalities or with more famous victims, though that's hard to quantify.

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