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:

Year	Accidents
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:

Year	Accidents, World	Industrialized World	U.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.