Global airlines are heading for the safest year on record with an average by the end of November of only one accident of any type for every 5.3 million flights, the international airline body IATA reported on Thursday.
The Geneva-based IATA also said that so far in 2012 for the first time since the infancy of the industry in the second and third decades of the last century there had been not one loss of a Western-built jet aircraft among its 240 members.
"As of November 30, if you were to take a flight every day, the odds are that you would fly 14,000 years without an accident," its chief safety officer Gunther Matschnigg told reporters at a briefing. Overall fatalities across the industry, including airlines that do not belong to IATA or have not yet been admitted because they do not conform to its safety standards, came to 401, compared with 490 in the January-November period in 2011, Matschnigg said.
13/12/12 Reuters/Daily News & Analysis
