Boeing Annual Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents

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Description

Each year since 1959, Boeing Commercial Airplanes has published its “Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents Worldwide Operations”. The statistics presented in these Annual Summaries are based only on commercial jet airplanes which are heavier than 60000lb (27 tonnes) maximum gross weight. However, aircraft manufactured in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) or the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) are excluded because of the lack of operational data. Commercial aeroplanes operated in military service are excluded but if a military-owned commercial jet transport is used for civilian commercial service, it will be included in respect of such operations.

Definitions

The definitions used in these Summaries are largely based on corresponding International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), National Transportation Safety Board (USA) (NTSB) or Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) terms and are explained in the preface to each edition of the Summary. A few terms, as follows, are defined by Boeing:

Accident Rates: In general, this expression is a measure of accidents per million departures. Departures (or flight cycles) are used as the basis for calculating rates, since there is a stronger statistical correlation between accidents and departures than there is between accidents and flight hours, or between accidents and the number of airplanes in service, or between accidents and passenger miles/km or freight miles/km. Since aeroplane departure data is continually updated and revised as new information and estimating processes become available and used to update the baseline for the measurement of accident rates, the same rate may vary between different editions of the Summary.
Airplane Collisions: Events involving two or more aeroplanes are counted as separate events, one for each aeroplane. So of two aeroplanes are destroyed as the result of a collision, this is considered as 2 accidents.
Fatal Accident: An accident that results in fatal injury.
Hull Loss: An aeroplane totally destroyed or damaged and not repaired. Hull loss also includes, but is not limited to, events in which:
- The airplane is missing; or
- The search for the wreckage has been terminated without it being located; or
- The airplane is completely inaccessible.

NB: It is noted that neither the ICAO nor the NTSB currently has a definition for hull loss.

The Definition of an ‘Event’

The following events are not included in the data:

Fatal and non-fatal injuries from natural causes,
Fatal and non-fatal self-inflicted injuries or injuries inflicted by other persons,
Fatal and non-fatal injuries of stowaways hiding outside the areas normally available to the passengers and crew,
Non-fatal injuries resulting from atmospheric turbulence, normal manoeuvring, loose objects, boarding, disembarking, evacuation, and maintenance and servicing,
Non-fatal injuries to persons not on board an aeroplane,
Experimental test flights (however, maintenance test flights, ferry, positioning, training, and demonstration flights are not excluded),
Sabotage, hijacking, terrorism, and military action.