Washington — Here's an odd statistic for a year dominated by the images of planes crashing into buildings: There were fewer major airplane accidents in 2001 than in any year since World War II.
That's because record-keepers don't count the four airliners that crashed Sept. 11 as accidents, but purposeful crashes by terrorists.
So the Aviation Safety Network counted 34 major airplane accidents last year, the same as in 1984 and the fewest number since 1945, when the global database began keeping records.
Those 34 accidents last year claimed 1,118 lives.
That's far fewer accidents and fewer dead than the average of 50 crashes, killing 1,451 people.
Most people can't help but focus on the mass deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks and the Nov. 12 crash of American Airlines Flight 587, which killed 260 on board and five on the ground in New York, said Harro Ranter, founder of the Netherlands-based Aviation Safety Network.
"But still, if you look at the big picture, it just turned out to be the safest year," Ranter said Monday.
While the skies today are increasingly crowded, government regulations and better technology are combining to make air travel safer, said Dale Oderman, Purdue University aviation technology professor.
"It's a good thing," said Les Dorr, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman. "From our perspective, that's the way it should be."
Ranter's database lists only two U.S. crashes other than AA flight 587: a DC-3 freight plane carrying frozen cod sperm that crashed in Alaska last January, killing two crew members, and an air taxi that crashed in Michigan in February, killing two crew members.
Globally, the chances of surviving a crash dropped precipitously, according to Ranter's analysis. In 2001, 1,118 people died out of 1,238 people on board the crashed airplanes, for a fatality rate of 90 percent. In the previous decade only 72 percent of people on board died in fatal crashes.
The fatality rate in 2001 was the highest since 1985 (93 percent) and third-highest since World War II.
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