It also should be considered that accidents depend on chance. It is completely fine to point out that aviation has gained an enormous standard of safety, which is the result of around of a hundred years of constant vigilance and self improvement of the industry.
Nevertheless a commercial airliner, recently produced, lost a door mid flight. Under less fortunate circumstances that <i>could</i> have been a major disaster and the statistic would look very different.<p>I think the worry people have is that safety standards are <i>slipping</i>, when it comes to building airplanes, specifically Boeing building airplanes. This is not something that would be noticeable in an accident statistic while it is actually happening, yet it is an extremely serious matter for the safety of aviation <i>in the future</i>.
The actual number of fatalities is a trailing metric, not a leading one, and it trails by <i>years</i>. Same for security incidents. Same for downtime.<p>Culture problems have a tendency of not showing themselves until things are extremely dire.
> To wit, according to the annual report just released by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) 2023 goes down as one of the safest years in commercial aviation history. Not a single fatal accident was recorded involving a commercial jet. Not one.<p>> Combining jet and turboprop operations, IATA says there were 37 million commercial flights last year. Among those, the only deadly crash was that of an ATR turboprop in Nepal last January.<p>Someone both died and didn't die?
Given the level of sophistication and automation in commercial planes, the technological advances makes it the default state to be safer and safer every year. It is like Newton's apple falling and reporting "the apple altitude decreased again" - it is obvious it should.<p>At the same time, the incidents last year are not excusable. This is all the noise about, the quality control problems are inexcusable and having a safe year does not do anything to save face.