Flightglobal

Forty-five years of airline safety analysis

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

For more than 50 years Flight International/FlightGlobal has been publishing a review of world airline safety performance annually, but for the last 45 of them I have been the compiler and author. The most recent review – containing analysis and a list of all the fatal and many of the significant non-fatal airline accidents in 2025 – can be found here on FlightGlobal’s website.

My first safety review for Flight International magazine covered the year 1980. A few years later, in 1985, I reported on the worst year in aviation history in terms of the number of passengers and crew killed: 2,230 deaths in 41 fatal accidents. Last year the figures were respectively 420 and 11, despite the fact that the number of airline passengers carried is now about four times what it was in 1980, and the number of flights has increased about three-fold.

So where are we today in terms of airline safety performance? Obviously massively better than it was in the 1980s, but by comparison with the annual figures in the most recent decade, 2025’s numbers were slightly lower than the average for fatal accidents, and rather higher than the average (276) for the number of annual fatalities.

FlightGlobal/Flight International explains: “The principal reason for the relatively high casualty numbers – a total of 420 for the year – was that more than half of them died in a single, catastrophic crash involving an Air India Boeing 787-8 after departing Ahmedabad International airport on 12 June.”

Flight concedes, however, that “2025 was an unremarkable year – statistically – for fatal accidents.” And those most recent ten-year figures have been remaining fairly constant around a historic best-ever level, so any useful safety review needs to ask what the industry is getting right, as well as studying the mistakes.

The article debates in detail whether the action by one of the Air India pilots of closing both the engines’ fuel control switches seconds after take-off from Ahmedabad was an extraordinary mistake or a deliberate act (as does my previous piece in this blog). The Indian Air Accident Investigation Bureau confirms the pilot’s act of shutting off the fuel, and within about a year its report should be able to provide a verdict on why he did it.

Summing up safety in 2025, FlightGlobal said: “Apart from the Air India loss, almost all the ­accidents can be considered to have been “traditional” in nature. That is, they were caused by exposure to ordinary threats such as bad weather, pilots taking avoidable risks, or errors of omission or commission, bird-strikes, turbulence encounters and maintenance shortcomings.”

One of the primary reasons air travel is so much safer than it used to be is that the aircraft and engines are better engineered than they were forty years ago, and smart avionics give the crews more information presented more intuitively. There is a parallel between engineering advances in the avation and automotive industries. Anyone who owns a new car today recognises that its reliability and its technology is much better than cars built in the 1980s.

The theoretical downside of “smarter” aircraft is that they are highly computerised and thus more complex, but in practice that concern is not borne out because the systems are so reliable they rarely go wrong, and they are self-monitoring so the pilots are kept informed of systems health.

The human factors worry is that the sheer reliability means pilots may be lulled into a comfortable, non-critical mindset, so when something does go wrong they are startled and may react inappropriately. Again – theoretically – there is more that can go wrong because aircraft may still be traditional mechanical machines, but they are overlaid with software-driven sensors and computerised flight management systems. On the rare occasions when these go wrong, however, the crew may be confronted with a problem that has never presented before, so there is no checklist to deal with it.

For that reason, today’s crews in their basic training are still confronted with traditional problems like engine failure, but their advanced and continuation training is designed to inculcate a resilient mindset, based on flight priorities, paticularly when something unidentified has gone wrong: 1. Aviate, 2. Navigate, 3. Communicate.

Aviate: is the aircraft flying at the appropriate speed, height and attitude? Navigate: what is the aircraft’s position, is it heading in the direction it should be, and what is the fuel state? Communicate: report your situation to ATC, then work with other crew to deternine the best course of action to deal with the problem, and tell the cabin crew chief what is going on. Finally, while dealing with the problem, revisit your priorities over and over again: are you aviating right, are you navigating right, are you communicating what people need to know?

On this theme of training pilots to interface with the aircraft’s systems, the air transport industry – like all others – has to prepare to make good use of the next level of information technology: artificial intelligence (AI). In a thoughtful paper entitled Artificial Intelligence in Aviation, IFALPA (International Federation of Airline Pilot Associations) warns the industry to be ready to use AI with care to support the piloting task. It advises: “The role of AI in the operation of a flight should always be to support the humans in the system”, adding: “For this to be effective, whatever the intended capability of an AI system, it should only present options to a pilot, never a fixed outcome. There should also be transparency to the pilot as to how these options have been selected, and the level of confidence associated with them.”

2025 may have played out with a relatively small number of low-tech airline accidents, but we have to be ready for something different, and hopefully even better.

2024 airline accidents are up

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , ,

There are still two months to go before the end of 2024, but the number of fatal airline accidents worldwide this year already comfortably exceeds the 2023 total. We’re not in disaster territory yet because the previous year’s total was exceptionally good.

Prominent risks facing the airlines today, according to incidents this year, include repeated runway incursions and airport air traffic control errors causing collision risk, and a rising number of in-flight turbulence incidents in which passengers and crew are severely injured or – in one case – killed.

Two countries that have had bad safety performance levels for many years – Indonesia and Nepal – have each suffered fatal accidents already this year, suggesting they have yet to get to grips with their national aviation safety cultures.

Each year for the last 44 years I have produced the world airline safety review for FlightGlobal and Flight International, and I have been commissioned once again to carry out their reviews for the current year. As usual, in January, it will provide fine detail of significant accidents and incidents, and analyze changes, trends and safety culture issues around the globe. The last annual review is here.

We wait to see whether November and December will add to the year’s accident total. Or not.

How much airline safety is luck?

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

 

If you look at the statistics for fatal airline accidents in 2017, the year looked faultless.

There were no fatal accidents – at least not among the mainline carriers operating passenger jets.

But if you look at the number of near-disasters, and especially if you hear the accounts of what happened on board and imagine the trauma the survivors underwent, you might wonder what made the difference between the mishaps they survived and fatal crashes in recent years that had almost identical precursors.

The answer is luck. Not a scientific answer, but it is the only word in the English language that describes that difference. A study Flight International/FlightGlobal will shortly publish (Flight International issue 23-29 January) contains an analysis of how luck works in today’s air travel.

Giving detail of numerous recent near-disastrous mishaps, the report observes:  “Sometimes these mishaps start with a technical problem, but more often they are the result of inadequate crew knowledge, poor procedural discipline or simple human carelessness.”

Many of them ended up as that most common of all airline accidents, runway excursions or overruns on landing, and the result is usually serious and very expensive damage.

Pegasus Airlines at Trabzon, Turkey, 13 January (Twitter World News)

The spectrum of industry discussion about how to deal with this “luck” factor includes – at one end of the scale – automating pilots and their fallibilities out of the picture, and at the other end imbuing today’s crews with a quality referred to as “resilience”. The latter is the ability to face a surprising or unforeseen combination of circumstances with cool logic based on knowledge, situational awareness and skill. That’s what most passengers assume all pilots have.

Airline pilots today are firmly discouraged by their employers from disconnecting the autopilot and autothrottle during revenue flights. There are good reasons for this, the most obvious being that the automation – properly programmed – flies the aircraft more accurately than most pilots can. The argument against it is that if the automation is wrongly programmed, or used  unintentionally in the wrong mode, or suffers a rare failure, the pilot reaction to the unintended consequences frequently demonstrates a lack of “resilience”, setting off a chain of events that can lead to an accident.

The question is, if pilots were permitted to fly their aircraft manually more often during revenue passenger flights, would their manual flying and associated cognitive skills be better primed for the unexpected, making a resilient response more likely when things don’t go according to plan? Pilot organisations like IFALPA believe they would.

To many airlines, that idea is heresy. Letting pilots “practice” flying with passengers on board is just not acceptable, they argue. “Practicing” (what pilots call flying) should only take place in a simulator or an empty aeroplane, they maintain.

The main problem with simulators is that, although getting better all the time, they will – psychologically – be no preparation for the real environment. The sense of risk, or fear, and the stress generated by it, can never be replicated in a simulator.

The reason aeroplanes have not been even more automated than they have been so far is that most flights don’t happen exactly as planned, so the pilots have frequently to intervene to make decisions and adjust the trajectory, even if they use the automation to do it.

This is a discussion that will – and should – continue, and the existing polarisation of views also seems likely to persist.

What is really needed is a cost-benefit and risk examination of whether the regular employment of manual and traditional pilot cognitive skills in flight has net advantages or disadvantages for airlines, but such research has never been carried out.

The ideal institution to do it would be the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse , which has expertise in measuring neuro-ergonomics in working pilots. ISAE has successfully carried out studies of the effect of stress on pilot cognitive and manual skills, and tested ways of re-orienting pilots when they lose situational awareness.

 

Egyptair MS804: significance of ACARS messages clarified

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Airbus is not, at present, able to give specific advice to A320 operators based on information available from the Egyptair MS804 investigation, according to a report by Flightglobal senior journalist David Kaminski-Morrow.

Data transmitted by the aircraft’s ACARS messaging unit to the Egyptair operations centre is insufficient to point to a cause, he reports, explaining: “Airbus has already informed operators, via two accident information bulletins, that the available data is limited and that the analysis of the transmissions does not contain enough data to determine the accident sequence, Flightglobal has established.”

The Flightglobal report continues: “With the inquiry unable to conclude whether a technical flaw contributed to the crash, the airframer has been unable to provide any immediate advisory to operators.

“Although seven ACARS maintenance messages transmitted in the space of 3min – between 02:26 and 02:29 Egyptian time – hint at the possibility of smoke and heat in the forward fuselage, there is no confirmation that the time-stamp of the messages correlates with the order of the trigger event and no clear indication of the precise time interval between them.”

The unknown factor is the “trigger event” referred to. The ACARS messages (see earlier blog entries) and the circumstances of the crew’s loss of control over the aircraft do not provide specific evidence to indicate either sabotage or a fault as the trigger event.  But whichever it was, it appears to have generated fire that caused progressive electrical failures, and the crew’s loss of control over the aircraft ensued soon after that.

Floating wreckage and body parts recovered from the water where the aircraft crashed into the Mediterranean Sea north of Alexandria, Egypt, so far provide no clue as to whether sabotage or another cause brought the aircraft down. And the search coordinators have released no information about how widely the wreckage field is spread. This can be an indicator of whether the aircraft came down in one piece or had broken up in the sky, but after time the clues can be lost because the floating wreckage can be spread by sea currents and wind.

All this makes the recovery of the main wreckage and the flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the sea bed vital for the understanding of what caused the loss.

 

Learmount is dead, long live Learmount.com

David Learmount Uncategorized , , ,

Followers of the Flightglobal blog “Learmount”  – which will soon slide gently into the great digital graveyard – welcome to my new site.

This one will offer much the same as my Flighglobal blog did. It’ll certainly serve the same audience – namely aviation’s front-liners – discussing news that affects their lives and profession.

Why the change?

I am maintaining my links with Flightglobal and Flight International as their Consulting Editor, but after many happy years there I’ve now got my P45 and my independence.

I hope you’ll find this space useful, and enjoy it as well.

Let’s aviate, navigate and communicate.