Airline mishaps remained low in 2015

Good news for all of you white-knuckle fliers: 2015 was another safe year for commercial air travel worldwide.

For the entire year, the accident rate was the equivalent of only one major accident for every 3.1 million flights, according to the International Air Transport Assn., the trade group for the world’s carriers.

“In terms of the number of fatal accidents, it was an extraordinarily safe year,” said Tony Tyler, chief executive of the trade group.

The number of major accidents was down nearly 12% compared to 2014 and the number of fatalities caused by those accidents dropped to 136 deaths compared with 641, the trade group said. About 3.5 billion people flew safely on 37.6 million commercial flights in 2015.

The accident rate does not include the crashes of Germanwings 9525 and Metrojet 9268 because those disasters were classified as deliberate acts — a suicide by the copilot in the case of Germanwings and terrorism for Metrojet.

But even when the fatalities from the Germanwings and the Metrojet crashed are included in the calculations, the number of aviation deaths in 2015 was nearly on par with the five-year average of 504 deaths per year.

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