According to AirDisaster.com, of nearly 19 million international departures last year, there were just 43 accidents, entailing 674 fatalities. In 1970, there were only six million departures but 69 accidents and 1,583 deaths. During that period, the average number of fatal accidents has fallen from 11.5 per million flights to 2.3 per million.
Actually, last year was a bit of an anomaly - there have only been four years in the past 30 when the death toll has dropped below a thousand.
AirDisaster.com is my favourite of a growing list of air-disaster Web sites.
Besides its statistics and disaster database, the site offers photographs and streaming videos, eyewitness accounts, investigations and links to official reports.
It also has a good selection of cockpit voice-recorder (black box) recordings and audio files from the cockpit and air-traffic-control towers.
According to Aviation Safety Network (aviation-safety.net), Hong Kong's earliest air crash came in 1947, when a Philippine Air Lines cargo plane crashed into Mount Parker. The worst air disaster came the following year, when a Civil Air Transport plane crashed into Basalt Island, killing all 33 on board.
The site has a reasonable list of black-box transcripts and RealAudio links, some of which come from Hong Kong accidents and which make for eerie reading.
Aviation Safety carries a database of accidents dating back to 1945 and has a neat index of accidents by country.
The accidents are usually accompanied by detailed descriptions with quick reference tables and, in some cases, photographs and links to official reports.
For the best selection of air-accident photographs, visit airliners.net. Here, you will find more than 90,000 photographs of every kind of passenger, cargo and military aircraft in service, with a great many before and after photographs of accidents.
Naturally, there are plenty of submissions from snap-happy Hong Kongers. One nifty feature on this site is that any photograph in the database can be converted into an e-mail postcard.
Over the past couple of years, Asia's airlines have been picking up a pretty poor reputation for safety.
At Airsafe.com, a section of the site has been put together specifically for Asian air safety (airsafe.com/pr/asiasafe.htm). It also has good information and links on air rage, pet travel and fear of flying, which, it seems, still affects the majority of air passengers to some extent. Probably more so when they are flying in the mainland.
It is not the most attractive site, and apart from the database itself, most pages are sketchy or incomplete. Worst is a weak list of famous people who have died in air disasters. It does not mention Glenn Miller, Buddy Holly or even the late, great John Denver.
E-mail Neil Taylor at neiltaylor@ scmp.com
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