More airline passengers died due to deliberate acts than from accidental airliner crashes for the second successive year in 2015, an aviation report says.
Flightglobal crunched the numbers and said there were only eight accidental airline crashes last year, claiming the lives of 161 passengers and crew, the lowest tally since at least 1946.
A Germanwings plane was deliberately flown into a mountainside in the French Alps in March, and a Russian airliner that exploded over Egypt in October accounted for 374 deaths.
In 2014, there were 537 deaths classified as ‘deliberate’ from two Malaysian Airlines incidents with the shooting down of MH17 over Ukraine and the still unaccounted for MH370 which was en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
"In recent years, airline safety has improved very considerably to the point where, typically, there are now very few fatal accidents and fatalities in a year. However, flight security remains a concern," said Paul Hayes, Flightglobal’s director of air safety and insurance.
