2014 Was Safest Flying Year Ever

The cautious traveller might be forgiven for being wary of flying given some high profile air crashes that have hit the news of late.

In the news in 2014 crashes such as Malaysia Airlines MH370 which disappeared carrying 239 people, Malaysian Airlines MH17 which was shot down over Ukraine with 298 people, and Air Algerie AH5017 crashed with 116 passengers and crew aboard, hit the headlines.

However, you'd be wrong to conclude that these crashes indicated that air safety is in crisis in any way. On the contrary, 2014 was the safest aviation travel year since records began in 1942. The 20 airliner crashes of 2014, although tragic, is the lowest on record:

Or, to put it another way, whilst there was a spike in fatalities in 2014 due to a couple of large crashes, that's still way down on the peak of air crash fatalities in the 70's, 80's and 90's, and that's despite the fact that low cost air travel means there's way more flights undertaken than ever before:

To put this in perspective, the number of crashes is 2.1 per one million flights, which is pretty damn safe in other words.