(This is the final article in a series about landmark developments in aviation safety since Flight Safety Foundation was founded in 1945.)
Despite a spate of accidents in commercial and business aviation in 2024 and 2025, air travel has become remarkably safe in the eight decades since Flight Safety Foundation was established in 1945.
World War II had introduced turbine engines, pressurized cabins, and radar, among other things, to military air forces. At the war’s end, those advances were incorporated into civil aviation — some of the earliest advances in technology and safety that contributed, within just a few years, to an impressive decline in accident numbers and laid the groundwork for the development of the industry’s impressive safety record.
In the early post-war years, accidents — including those with multiple fatalities — were frequent, and the accident-prevention efforts mounted by Flight Safety Foundation and others were ceaseless. Among the earliest efforts: The Foundation held the world’s first international air safety summit; conducted the first formal course in accident investigation and the first computer modeling of accident forces; and created the first international confidential safety-reporting system.
The Foundation was an early proponent of just culture in the aviation workplace and a consistent advocate of the expansion of voluntary, confidential reporting programs by regulators and operators.
In the 1990s and beyond, the Foundation led international efforts to prevent controlled flight into terrain and approach and landing accidents, both of which were responsible for hundreds of fatalities, and ground accident damage, which has totaled billions of dollars. Other efforts have included studies of pilot fatigue and recommendations for fatigue management, as well as the development of guidelines for coping with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Repeated efforts have addressed runway safety, most recently in the form of global actions plans for the prevention of runway excursions — the most frequent accident type — and runway incursions — among the most persistent and most deadly types.
The results of those and other industrywide efforts have played a critical role in reducing aviation accident rates and associated fatalities.
Steadily Declining Accident Rates
In 1959, the year generally considered to mark the start of the Jet Age, data compiled by Boeing and included in the company’s 2025 Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents show the fatal accident rate for commercial jet airplanes was more than 35 per million departures. One decade into the Jet Age, Boeing’s data for 1969 measured a decline to less than five fatal accidents per million departures.1
The decline has continued. Boeing’s Statistical Summary, which contained data from 1959 through 2024, showed a 65 percent decline in the fatal accident rate between 1975 and 2024, as well as a 40 percent decline in the total accident rate, combined with a 23 percent increase in departures.
Along similar lines, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) identified 46 accidents (including seven fatal accidents and 244 onboard fatalities) in 2024, with a total accident rate of 1.13 per million flights. The accident total included seven fatal accidents with 244 onboard fatalities. IATA calculated a fatality risk rate of 0.06 per million sectors, and interpreted that statistic to mean that, “at this level of safety, an individual would need to travel by air every day for 15,871 years to experience a fatal accident.”2
Using different definitions, Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network counted 132 accidents involving airliner of all types, in 2024, including 15 fatal accidents.3
Overall, since the end of the pandemic, commercial jet traffic has increased to 4 billion to 5 billion passengers a year “and in comparison, accident numbers are very small,” Flight Safety Foundation President and CEO Dr. Hassan Shahidi said.
Post-pandemic growth is strong, especially in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and one result will be a significant demand for aircraft and personnel over the next 20 years, he said, adding that in some parts of the world, regulators may have difficulty keeping up.
Along with growth, the industry must ensure that operators in all segments are advancing data-driven best practices, “not only being compliant with regulations but going above and beyond,” he said.
The Foundation warned, in its 2024 Safety Report, against complacency and lapses in compliance with international safety standards. Compliance with those standards is essential, and without it, Shahidi said, safety cannot be achieved.
Pinpointing Likely Accident Factors
Noting that forecasts call for significantly increased demand for new aircraft and new personnel, Shahidi called for a continuing emphasis on promoting safety, in part through industrywide data-sharing and analysis programs.
“We should be looking at predictive efforts to pinpoint likely areas for accidents to stop them before they happen,” he said.
In the near future, those efforts are likely to focus, in part, on runway safety, with new programs aimed at reducing runway excursions and incursions; on finding ways to limit encounters with turbulence, which experts say are likely to increase because of climate change; on incorporating drones and other new entrants into shared airspace; and on upgrading air traffic control systems to handle increased traffic.
Additionally, the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) promises to enhance training for pilots and air traffic controllers, to help optimize flight profiles, and to aid in the prevention of critical in-flight problems. AI also will increasingly be used to help detect possible accident precursors in vast quantities of data, and as a decision support tool.
In a 2023 report, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency’s then-executive director, Patrick Ky, noted AI’s potential to transform aviation through the creation of intelligent systems capable of enhancing safety “in ways that were previously unimaginable.”
At the same time, flight training specialists say that VR —already being used in a variety of training scenarios — is helping pilots practice their responses to emergencies, review airport layouts, and review a number of other tasks; its use will expand in coming years, experts say.
Other topics on the Foundation’s agenda in coming years include:
- The promotion of mental health and well-being for those in the industry. The Foundation’s Path to Wellness: Charting a Course for Mental Health in Aviation, published in late 2024, discusses the need to prioritize mental health as an essential aspect of overall well-being and to eliminate stigmas surrounding mental health problems.
- The importance of aviation executives in strengthening their organizations to enable them to meet the industry’s challenges, proactively eliminate risks, and sustain a strong safety culture. The Foundation’s most recent publication, Seven Essential Principles of Aviation Safety Leadership, calls for embedding safety as a core organizational value while also developing efficiency and organization.
- Continuation of efforts to upgrade the collection and analysis of accident and incident data. The Foundation’s 2021 initiative, Learning From All Operations, emphasizes the need for the industry to expand its accident-prevention efforts to focus not only on accident and incident report analyzing things that have gone wrong but also on things that go right.
Bolstered by these and other initiatives, there’s “a significant opportunity for progress” over the next few years, Shahidi said — progress that will affect many aspects of aviation, including increased situational awareness for pilots and air traffic controllers, enhanced safety management, and an improved regulatory framework worldwide.
Image: @ alexsl | iStockphoto
Notes
- Data was shown in Boeing’s Statistical Summary, in the figure “Accident Rates and Onboard Fatalities by Year.” Boeing data excludes aircraft manufactured in the former Soviet Union because of a lack of operational data. In later years, aircraft manufactured in the Commonwealth of Independent States were excluded for the same reason.
- IATA data includes turbine-powered commercial aircraft with a maximum takeoff weight of more than 5,700 kg/12,540 lb in scheduled passenger and cargo flights.
- The Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network defines an airliner as any aircraft model certified to carry more than 14 passengers. Most are jet- or turboprop-powered, but the dataset includes some piston-powered aircraft.
