Aviation safety is the study and practice of managing risks in aviation. This includes preventing aviation accidents and incidents through research, training aviation personnel, protecting passengers and the general public, and designing safer aircraft and aviation infrastructure. The aviation industry is subject to significant regulations and oversight to reduce risks across all aspects of flight. Adverse weather conditions such as turbulence, thunderstorms, icing, and reduced visibility are also recognized as major contributing factors to aviation safety.
Aviation security focuses on protecting air travelers, aircraft and infrastructure from intentional harm or disruption, rather than unintentional mishaps.
Statistics
Evolution
Aviation is safer today than ever. Modern commercial aviation boasts an accident rate of approximately 1 fatal accident per 16 million flights, far lower than historic numbers.
On December 14, 1903, the Wright Brothers conducted a test flight of their powered airplane from the slope of Big Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina. Upon takeoff, the airplane lifted about 15 feet off the ground, stalled, and crashed into the sand. Only three days later, on December 17, 1903, Wilbur's brother, Orville Wright flew the airplane for the world's first powered, sustained, and controlled heavier-than-air flight in history. Although the failed test flight on December 14 would be mostly forgotten in aviation, it remains one of the earliest recorded aviation accidents in history.
In the early years of air travel, accidents were exceedingly common. In 1928 and 1929, the overall accident rate was about 1 in every million miles (1.6 million kilometers) flown. In today's industry, that accident rate would translate to about 7,000 fatal accidents each year.
For the ten-year period 2002 to 2011, 0.6 fatal accidents happened per one million flights globally, 0.4 per million hours flown, and 22.0 fatalities per one million flights or 12.7 per million hours flown.
From 310 million passengers in 1970, air transport had grown to 3,696 million in 2016, led by 823 million in the United States, then 488 million in China. In 2016, 19 fatal accidents involved civil airliners with more than 14 passengers. These accidents resulted in 325 fatalities, the second safest year ever after 2015 with 16 accidents and 2013 with 265 fatalities. For planes heavier than 5.7 metric tones, there were 34.9 million departures and 75 accidents worldwide with 7 of these fatal for 182 fatalities, the lowest since 2013 : fatalities per million departures.
In 2017, there were 10 fatal airliner accidents, resulting in 44 occupant fatalities and 35 persons on the ground: the safest year ever for commercial aviation, both by the number of fatal accidents as well as in fatalities.
By 2019, fatal accidents per million flights decreased 12-fold since 1970, from 6.35 to 0.51, and fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometre (RPK) decreased 81-fold from 3,218 to 40.
Typology Runway safety represents % of accidents, ground safety % and loss of control in-flight %.
Loss of control inflight represents 35% of the fatal accidents, Controlled flight into terrain 21%, runway excursions 17%, system or component failure: 6%, Touchdown off the runway: 5%, Abnormal Runway Contact: 4% and fire: 2%.
Safety has improved through better aircraft design process, engineering and maintenance, the evolution of navigation aids, and safety protocols and procedures.
Transport comparisons There are three main ways in which the risk of fatality in a certain mode of travel can be measured: (1) deaths per billion typical journeys taken, (2) deaths per billion hours traveled, and (3) deaths per billion kilometers traveled. The following table displays these statistics for the United Kingdom (1990–2000),The risks of travel . The site cites the source as an October 2000 article by Roger Ford in the magazine Modern Railways and based on a DETR survey. and has been appended. (Note that aviation safety does not include travelling to the airport.)
Transportation type Deaths per billion Journeys Hours Kilometers Bus 4 11 0.4 Rail 20 30 0.6 Van 20 60 1.2 Private Car 40 130 3.1 Foot 40 220 54.2 Water 90 50 2.6 Air 117 31 0.05 Pedal cycle 170 550 44.6 Motorcycle 1640 4840 108.9 Paragliding Skydiving Space Shuttle
The first two statistics are computed for typical travels by their respective forms of transport, so they cannot be used directly to compare risks related to different forms of transport in a particular travel "from A to B". For example, these statistics suggest that a typical flight from Los Angeles to New York would carry a larger risk factor than a typical car travel from home to office. However, car travel from Los Angeles to New York would not be typical; that journey would be as long as several dozen typical car travels, and thus the associated risk would be larger as well. Because the journey would take a much longer time, the overall risk associated with making this journey by car would be higher than making the same journey by air, even if each individual hour of car travel is less risky than each hour of flight.
For risks associated with long-range intercity travel, the most suitable statistic is the third one: deaths per billion kilometers. Still, this statistic can lose credence in situations where the availability of an air option makes an otherwise inconvenient journey possible.
Aviation industry insurers base their calculations on the deaths per journey statistic while the aviation industry itself generally uses the deaths per kilometre statistic in press releases.
Since 1997, the number of fatal air accidents has been no more than 1 per 2,000,000,000 person-miles flown, and thus is one of the safest modes of transportation when measured by distance traveled.
The Economist notes that air travel is safer by distance travelled, but trains are as safe as planes. It also notes that cars are four times more hazardous for deaths per time travelled, and cars and trains are respectively three times and six times safer than planes by number of journeys taken.
Because the above figures focus on everyday transportation, air travel is taken to include only standard civil passenger aviation offered commercially to the general public. Military and special-purpose aircraft are excluded.
United States
Between 1990 and 2015, there were 1874 commuter and air taxi accidents in the U.S. of which 454 (%) were fatal, resulting in 1,296 deaths, including 674 accidents (36%) and 279 fatalities (22%) in Alaska alone.
The number of deaths per passenger-mile on commercial airlines in the United States between 2000 and 2010 was about 0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles. For driving, the rate was 150 per 10 billion vehicle-miles for 2000: 750 times higher per mile than for flying in a commercial airplane.
There were no fatalities on large scheduled commercial airlines in the United States for over nine years, between the Colgan Air Flight 3407 crash in February 2009 and a catastrophic engine failure on Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 in April 2018.
Security Another aspect of safety is protection from intentional harm or property damage, also known as security.
The terrorist attacks of 2001 are not counted as accidents. However, even if they were counted as accidents they would have added about 1 death per billion person-miles. Two months later, American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in New York City, killing 265 people, including 5 on the ground, causing 2001 to show a very high fatality rate. Even so, the rate that year including the attacks (estimated here to be about 4 deaths per billion person-miles), is safe compared to some other forms of transport when measured by distance traveled.
Developments
Before WWII The first aircraft electrical or electronic device avionics system was Lawrence Sperry's autopilot, demonstrated in June 1914. The Transcontinental Airway System chain of beacons was built by the Commerce Department in 1923 to guide airmail flights.
Gyrocopters were developed by Juan de la Cierva to avoid stall and spin accidents, and for that invented cyclic and collective controls used by helicopters. The first flight of a gyrocopter was on June 9th, 1923.
During the 1920s, the first laws were passed in the United States of America to regulate civil aviation, notably the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which required pilots and aircraft to be examined and licensed, for accidents to be properly investigated, and for the establishment of safety rules and navigation aids; under the Aeronautics Branch of the United States Department of Commerce (US DoC).
A network of aerial lighthouses was established in the United Kingdom and Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Use of the lighthouses has declined with the advent of radio navigation aids such as non-directional beacon (NDB), VHF omnidirectional range (VOR), and distance measuring equipment (DME). The last operational aerial lighthouse in the United Kingdom is on top of the cupola over the RAF College main hall at RAF Cranwell.
One of the first aids for air navigation introduced in the United States in the late 1920s was airfield lighting, to assist pilots in making landings in poor weather or after dark. The Precision Approach Path Indicator (PAPI) was developed from this in the 1930s, indicating to the pilot the angle of descent to the airfield. This later became adopted internationally through the standards of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
Jimmy Doolittle developed instrument rating and made his first 'blind' flight in September 1929. The March 1931 wooden wing failure of a Transcontinental & Western Air Fokker F-10 carrying Knute Rockne, coach of the University of Notre Dame's football team, showed cause for all-metal airframes and led to a more formal accident investigation system.
On 4 September 1933, a Douglas DC-1 test flight was conducted with one of the two engines shut down during the takeoff run, climbed to , and completed its flight, proving twin aircraft engine safety. With greater range than lights and weather immunity, radio navigation aids were first used in the 1930s, like the Australian Aeradio stations guiding transport flights, with a light beacon and a modified Lorenz beam transmitter (the German blind-landing equipment preceding the modern instrument landing system - ILS). ILS was first used by a scheduled flight to make a landing in a snowstorm at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1938. A form of ILS was adopted by the ICAO for international use in 1949.
Post-WWII
Hard runways were built worldwide for World War II to avoid waves and floating hazards plaguing seaplanes.
Developed by the U.S. and introduced during World War II, LORAN replaced the sailors' less reliable compass and celestial navigation over water and survived until it was replaced by the Global Positioning System.
Following the development of radar in World War II, it was deployed as a landing aid for civil aviation in the form of ground-controlled approach (GCA) systems then as the airport surveillance radar as an aid to air traffic control in the 1950s.
A number of ground-based weather radar systems can detect areas of precipitation such as thunderstorms, which are associated with severe turbulence.
A modern Honeywell Intuvue weather system visualizes weather patterns up to away.
Distance measuring equipment (DME) in 1948 and VHF omnidirectional range (VOR) stations became the main route navigation means during the 1960s, superseding the low frequency radio ranges and the non-directional beacon (NDB): the ground-based VOR stations were often co-located with DME transmitters and the pilots could establish their bearing and distance to the station.
Jetliners
To highlight the jetliner evolution, Airbus split them in four generations: