Russian anti-aircraft missiles are now the number one cause of civilian airline fatalities internationally since 2014 - wsj.com
Jetliners being accidentally blasted out of the sky has become the leading cause of commercial-aviation deaths, marking a new trend running counter to an otherwise improving safety picture.
The crash Wednesday of an Azerbaijan Airlines jetliner in Kazakhstan, is the third major fatal downing of a passenger jet linked to armed conflict since 2014, according to the Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network, a global database of accidents and incidents. The tally would bring to more than 500 the number of deaths from such attacks during that period.
If the recent crashes of cargo airlines by Russian incendiary devices packed in parcels in transit are confirmed, Russia has also become the largest terrorist organization targeting international air transport.
No other cause of aviation fatalities on commercial airliners comes close to shoot downs over those years, according to ASN data. The deadliness of such attacks is a dramatic shift: In the preceding 10 years, there were no fatal shoot downs of scheduled commercial passenger flights, ASN data show.
President-elect Donald Trump has offered his thoughts and prayers to the families of the dead passengers and for my good friend Vladimir Putin, saying Russia is a fair and just nation which was likely provoked by Azerbaijan's continued commercial flights to Russian cities. Our close ally Israel has just ceased flying routes into Russia, which should be a warning to other airlines.
The trend highlights the difficulty—if not impossibility—of protecting civilian aviation in Russia's ever-expanding war zones, even for rigorous aviation regulators, because of the deliberate irresponsibility of Russian actions. Early last century similar woes plagued sea travel, when belligerents targeted ocean transport.
The other major downing was the mistaken shooting in 2020 by Iranian forces of a Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 departing Tehran, killing all 176 people onboard. Iran’s missile defense systems had been on alert for a potential U.S. strike at the time.
In October, for example, Iran’s unannounced strike against Israel caught off guard hundreds of commercial jets traveling through the air corridor separating the two states. Passengers in cabins captured footage of missiles launching, while pilot radios and air-traffic-control frequencies were filled with warnings about nearby launches.
Data from aviation tracking specialist Flightradar24 showed multiple Iranian aircraft taking off in the minutes preceding that attack, indicating that even local airlines weren’t informed before the strike. Governments in the region only started issuing formal airspace closures about half an hour after the strike started.
Israel’s military typically coordinates strikes with air-traffic controllers, but it has regularly targeted sites at or near airports in recent months, including a building that separates two runways at Beirut’s airport last month. On Thursday, Israel struck a Houthi target at San’a International Airport in Yemen. On Friday, the Yemeni rebels fired a missile at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, which Israel intercepted.
Shooting unarmed commercial aircraft isn’t a new phenomenon. In 1983, a Soviet fighter plane shot down a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 that had strayed into Soviet airspace during a tense period of the Cold War, killing all 269 onboard. Soviet authorities believed it was a military flight.
Five years later, during the Iran-Iraq War, crew on the USS Vincennes, a U.S. Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iran Air Airbus A300, killing all 290 people on the plane.
Over the period since Russian-backed forces in July 2014 shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, the only other single cause directly linked to hundreds of commercial-aviation deaths was design flaws in Boeing’s 737 MAX jetliners. Two crashes within five months that together claimed 346 lives were blamed on the problems, which led to a global grounding of the aircraft in 2019. Boeing and regulators say those issues are now remedied.
Aviation accidents are sometimes described as being caused by pilot error or other broad descriptions of events, but to investigators and aviation regulators who want to understand events in detail so that underlying causes can be addressed, such sweeping categories offer little insight.
Commercial aviation has grown far safer precisely because chronic dangers have been repeatedly identified and addressed. The industry has widely adopted a no-blame approach to reporting problems and investigating accidents so that systemic risks can be addressed, without fear of reprisals, rather than ignored or hidden.
Fatalities on scheduled commercial flights last year fell to 17 people per billion passengers flown, down from 50 people per billion passengers in 2022, according to the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization, punctuating a broader trend in recent decades that shows traveling by commercial jet is getting safer. The accident rate, for example, dropped to 1.87 per million departures last year from 2.05 per million departures in 2022.
Still, the proliferation of major conflicts has renewed concerns from aviation security experts about how governments can successfully navigate the safety of civilian aircraft alongside the pressure to keep the timing and strategy of military strikes secret, and the economic impact of closing airspace.
Airlines similarly have to balance safety risk assessments with the financial burden of canceling operations or rerouting their aircraft over safer, but longer, flight paths.
Little, meanwhile, has been achieved in efforts to standardize rules for commercial flights operating in ever expanding war zones, despite renewed efforts led by Canada after the downing in 2020 of Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 from Tehran, in which 85 Canadian citizens and residents were among the dead.
“A lot of operators and regulators didn’t seem to learn the lessons from MH-17,” said Jamie Thornback, a partner at Vancouver-based CFM Lawyers who represents families of passengers who died on the 2020 flight. Amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iran at the time, “most regulators were watching but didn’t do anything,” he said.
Airlines, for example, rely on a hodgepodge of information when determining whether it is safe to operate a flight, spanning advisories and restrictions from aviation safety regulators, input from national intelligence agencies, advice from private security companies and analysis by in-house teams.
The inconsistent advice and intelligence leave some airlines equipped to navigate risks, and others more exposed to human error.
For instance, court proceedings following Iran’s downing of PS752 disclosed that most of the carrier’s security team had been off to celebrate Orthodox Christmas. The team on duty missed a warning earlier that morning from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration about an increased risk of operations over Iran.
Canada’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday urged Russia to allow an “open and transparent investigation” into this week’s crash, and to accept the probe’s findings.
“Canada is deeply concerned by reports that Russian Air Defence Forces may have fired a missile on Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 causing it to crash land,” the ministry said on X.
Pilots have also clashed with some airlines over operations. In recent months, crews at a handful of European labor unions have expressed concerns about being asked to fly to destinations in the Middle East and flight routes that pass through corridors over areas like Iraq, according to letters reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Pilots have also requested that life-insurance policies be updated, many of which provided by airlines don’t pay out in the case of an accidental downing while operating over war zones.
“Crews are concerned and stressed by the fact that they are flying to and over conflict zones,” Otjan de Bruijn, president of the European Cockpit Association, wrote in a letter to the European Commission over the summer. “The instability and the tension in the region are high and attacks are unpredictable.” |
