SEOUL -- The Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes of
Boeing 737 Max 8s in October and March have hogged crash-related headlines in
recent months. But those accidents are actually part of a broader increase in
commercial airlines crashes over the past year and a half.
IATA data show that there were 62 total commercial aviation
accidents in 2018, which resulted in 523 fatalities. So far this year there
have been six fatal crashes, with the Ethiopian crash and the May crash of an
Aeroflot Sukhol Superjet accounting for 198 of the 206 deaths.
Addressing media at the IATA Annual General Meeting in Seoul
on Monday, Gilberto Lopez Meyer, the group's senior vice president of safety
and flight operations, said the trade group has analyzed the uptick in search
of a root cause.
"We couldn't find anything. It is just part of the
cycle that we see," he said.
The accident rate in 2018 was 1.35 per 1 million flights, up
from the record-low accident rate of 1.11 accidents per million flights in 2017,
when just 19 people died on commercial flights -- none of them on jet aircraft.
The accident data includes commercial charter flights and cargo operations as
well as regularly scheduled commercial service.
The 2018 bump, and this year's tough start, runs counter to a
trend of declining accidents between 2013 and 2018.
The two recent Boeing Max crashes have led to scrutiny of
whether the FAA's relationship with Boeing has become too cozy and whether the
agency gave the aerospace giant too much leeway to vouch for the safety of its
own aircraft components. The Department of Transportation's Office of the
Inspector General is undertaking reviews of the FAA's safety and maintenance
oversight of Southwest, Allegiant and American.
Lopez Meyer said that regulatory changes around the world,
new technology or even a period of unusual weather could lead to a bump in
aircraft crashes in a particular year. But a review by the organization found
none of those possibilities to have been the case in 2018.
"There appears to be no link between that and any root
cause that we could identify," he said.
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Correction: The Ethiopian Airlines and Aeroflot crashes have accounted for 198 of 206 commercial aviation fatalities this year. A previous version had incorrect numbers.