SEOUL, South Korea — A call for unity among aviation safety regulators was one of the primary points pushed by IATA last week as it gathered for its annual general meeting in this city of 25 million. But even as the trade group asked regulators worldwide to act in concert when it comes to lifting the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max, questions were arising about whether commercial aviation, despite myriad safety improvements over the decades, is growing less safe.
The Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes of 737 Max 8 jetliners in October and March have hogged headlines in recent months. But those accidents are actually part of a broader increase in commercial airline crashes and fatalities in the past year and a half.
IATA data shows there were 62 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 Sukhoi Superjet accounting for 198 of 206 deaths.
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, according to IATA. None of those deaths occurred on jet aircraft. The accident data includes commercial charter flights and cargo operations as well as regularly scheduled commercial service.
Addressing media in Seoul last week, Gilberto Lopez Meyer, IATA'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.
But others have begun to question if lax regulation could be factor in the recent increases.
"You get what you pay for," Geoffrey Dell, a safety scientist at Central Queensland University in Australia, told Bloomberg recently. "Everyone is moving back to a minimum regulatory standard. It's designed to give you the best outcome for the cheapest price."
To be sure, flying remains a safe way to travel. Last year, airlines transported 4.4 billion passengers. And though fatalities were up in 2018, the overall accident rate was still lower than the five-year average of 1.79 crashes per one million flights, according to IATA. Further, commercial aviation has not endured more than 1,000 fatalities in a year since 2005, though that number of deaths was routine until 2001.
Nevertheless, the two recent Boeing Max 8 crashes have led to scrutiny of the FAA's relationship with Boeing, with some saying it has become too cozy and that the agency gave the aerospace giant too much leeway to vouch for the safety of its own aircraft components.
In addition, a year ago the DOT's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) began reviews of the FAA's safety and maintenance oversight of Southwest, Allegiant and American. The Southwest audit was sparked by the April 2018 death of a Southwest passenger after an engine blade broke loose, sending debris through the window next to which she was seated. That was the first fatality on a U.S. airline since 2009.
The OIG began looking at the FAA's oversight of Allegiant after a "60 Minutes" report accused the agency of being too cozy with the discount carrier and too tolerant of a series of Allegiant mechanical issues.
Meanwhile, last July the OIG found that the FAA lacks adequate safeguards to properly oversee and respond to complaints about flight-test programs that airlines are required to conduct on aircraft that have undergone major repairs or maintenance.
The FAA acknowledges that over the course of decades the agency has shifted its approach more toward achieving compliance from airlines and less toward punitive action.
At the Regional Airline Association annual conference last September, acting FAA administrator Dan Elwell defended that approach, saying it has made sense, since commercial airline crashes are far less frequent than they were decades ago. As a result, the agency can no longer wait around for crashes and then use forensic analysis to learn how safeguards need to be enhanced.
You get data by telling airlines, 'Tell us what happened, and we can fix it together,'" Elwell said.
In an interview last week, Martin Harrison, an analyst for the ICF consultancy and a former COO at Spirit, said he believes the corrective approach taken by the FAA is the proper one.
"The punitive route, I think, is potentially less advantageous if it encourages people not to report," he said.
In Seoul, IATA's Lopez Meyer said regulatory changes around the world, new technology or even a period of unusual weather could lead to a bump in aircraft crashes in any particular year. But a review by the organization found none of those scenarios to have been the case in 2018.
Meanwhile, IATA director general Alexandre de Juniac used his opening address at the general meeting to call for a mending of the schism that occurred among regulatory agencies worldwide in March when they acted independently in their decisions to ground the 737 Max 8.
"Governments and industry must find a way to maintain public safety and confidence with fast and coordinated responses," he said.