Boeing releases annual airline safety summary

The main goal of AirSafe.com is to provide the public with useful and reliable information about airline safety and security. One of the best sources for information about accident rates for specific airline models is Boeing's Statistical Summary of Commercial Airplane Accidents. The newest edition, covering the period from 1959 to 2012, was released in August 2013, and includes a variety of resources, including a summary of selected airliner crashes from 2012, as well as comparative data on the accident rates of various aircraft models.

This publication is very useful in part because it provides a snapshot of accident trends for different aircraft models and for different areas of the world. It is also useful for the AirSafe.com audience because it provides a different point of view. These differences are most noticeable if you compare AirSafe.com's safety review for 2012 with the list in the Boeing publication.

While there is some overlap between the two annual lists, particularly the crashes that resulted in passenger deaths, there are some key differences. Boeing, like much of the airline industry, has a focus on events that cause significant and unrepairable damage to aircraft, and their accident statistics reflect that focus. While AirSafe.com does make note of a number of nonfatal events, only those events that result in passenger deaths are used in any statistical comparisons on the site. Also, Boeing does not list events, even ones involving passenger fatalities, if it involved aircraft designed in the former Soviet Union, or events involving turboprop driven airliners.

In spite of those differences, Boeing's Statistical Summary is one of the industry publications that has very high quality data, and should be consulted by anyone who has an interest in airline safety, especially to answer specific questions about airliner accident rates and how they have changed over the last several decades.

Related resources
2012 Boeing Statistical Summary
2011 Boeing Statistical Summary
2010 Boeing Statistical Summary
2009 Boeing Statistical Summary
2008 Boeing Statistical Summary
2007 Boeing Statistical Summary
AirSafe.com's fatal events by aircraft model

Newly Published Boeing Resource on Airline Accidents

The primary mission of AirSafe.com is to provide airline passengers and aviation professionals with reliable information about plane crashes and other issues or events related to aviation safety and aviation security. AirSafe.com and the AirSafe.com Foundation can't do this alone. They both rely on publicly available information for news events like recent crashes and for reliable data for determining things like fatal event rates for aircraft models.

Some data, like plane crashes and accident investigation reports, are very easy to find, often widely publicized, and sometimes published by authoritative sources like government agencies. Other data, for example the number of airplane flights for a particular model, are much harder to find. One of the best sources for information about accident rates for specific airline models is an annual publication from Boeing, the Statistical Summary of Commercial Airplane Accidents. The newest edition, covering 2008, was published in July 2009, and it provides a summary of last year's accidents as well as comparative data on the accident rates of various aircraft models.

Some of the key data from this publication is included within AirSafe.com, especially the Fatal Events by Aircraft Model page. Boeing's Statistical Summary is one of the industry publications that has very high quality data, and should be consulted by anyone who has an interest in airline safety, especially to answer specific questions about airliner accident rates and how they have changed over the last several decades.


You can download the most recent edition which covers 2008, and the previous one covering 2007 below. If you have an interest in how data like this is used to answer complex aviation risk and safety questions, you can also download two resources from AirSafe.com: selected portions of the book Understanding Aviation Safety Data from AirSafe.com founder Dr. Todd Curtis, or you can register for the free online class on how to systematically ask and answer an aviation safety question.

2008 Statistical Summary
2007 Statistical Summary
Online Class: How to Ask an Aviation Safety Question
Chapter 6 of Understanding Aviation Safety Data

AirSafe.com Offers Free Online Class

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