President Donald Trump on Tuesday tweeted praise for a report from the Flight Safety Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit that reported zero airline passenger deaths from a jet crash anywhere in the world.
Jet makers, the airline industry’s international trade group, and the United Nations’ air safety group all put together yearly lists of major airline accidents and fatalities, and the average number of deaths has been declining since 1997, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Safety experts said in The Journal that they could not recall a year that had no passenger fatalities on jet aircraft. "It’s the culmination of decades of work by thousands of people," said John Cox, a former U.S. airline captain, in The Wall Street Journal.
Scheduled airlines in the U.S. have not had a fatal crash on any type of equipment since February 2009, The Journal reported.
2017 is the safest year yet for airline operations, The Journal reported. Other Airline Safety Network figures show that yearly airliner accidents are down by two-thirds in the past decade, the report said.
The statistics do not include cargo flights, military transports, and accidents caused by intentional acts, The Journal reported.
Ten fatal airliner accidents resulted in 44 onboard deaths, including 12 deaths Sunday in a Cessna crash in Costa Rica, but five of those were cargo operations and the remaining number involved propeller-powered planes, the report said.
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