With just one accident for every 1.26 million flights, last year was the safest year ever for aviation, says IATA in its just-released 2023 Annual Safety Report. However, despite citing several 2023 parameters showing “best-ever” results, the association’s director general says, “We can never take safety for granted.”

“2023 safety performance continues to demonstrate that flying is the safest mode of transport,” said Willie Walsh. “Aviation places its highest priority on safety and that shows in the 2023 performance. Jet operations saw no hull losses or fatalities. 2023 also saw the lowest fatality risk and ‘all accident’ rate on record.”

But he added, “A single fatal turboprop accident with 72 fatalities… and two high profile accidents in the first month of 2024 show that, even if flying is among the safest activities a person can do, there is always room to improve. This is what we have done throughout our history. And we will continue to make flying ever safer.”

The report says that in 2023 there were 37 million aircraft movements in 2023 (jet and turboprop), an increase of 17% on the previous year. And there were no hull losses or fatal accidents involving passenger jet aircraft.

Also noted in the report:

• The all-accident rate was 0.80 per million sectors in 2023 (one accident for every 1.26 million flights), an improvement from 1.30 in 2022 and the lowest rate in over a decade. This rate outperformed the five-year (2019-2023) rolling average of 1.19 (an average one accident for every 880,293 flights).
• The fatality risk improved to 0.03 in 2023 from 0.11 in 2022 and 0.11 for the five years, 2019-2023. At this level of safety, on average a person would have to travel by air every day for 103,239 years to experience a fatal accident.
• IATA member airlines and IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) registered airlines experienced no fatal accident in 2023.
• A single fatal accident occurred in 2023, on a turboprop aircraft, resulting in 72 fatalities. This is reduced from five fatal accidents in 2022 and an improvement on the five-year average (2019-2023) which was five.

Regional safety

The 2023 all accident rate improved compared to 2022 for all regions with the exceptions of North America and Asia Pacific. No regions experienced a jet hull loss in 2023. Asia-Pacific recorded a fatal turboprop hull loss, a loss-of-control accident in Nepal in January 2023 with 72 fatalities.  As a consequence, all regions except Asia-Pacific recorded a fatality risk of zero in 2023.

In North America, the all-accident rate rose from 0.53 per million sectors in 2022 to 1.14 in 2023, but remained better than its five-year average for the region of 1.21. The largest proportion of accidents in 2023 were related to landing gear collapses.