The rate of commercial jet crashes around the world is climbing and a spate of recent fatal accidents threatens to push the totals to levels not seen since the 1990s.

"If we continue at this pace, we'll be turning the clock back 10 years on safety," says Bill Voss, president of the non-profit Flight Safety Foundation.
This year, the FSF reports, there have been a dozen major crashes worldwide, If that rate continues, there could be 20 or more crashes this year, the most since 24 jets crashed in 1999. Both 2007 and 2008, with 17 and 19 major crashes respectively, had totals higher than their preceding years.
Voss said the trend toward fewer accidents had been going on for so long he could not find a five-year span in which total crashes increased. The trend holds true even when gradual increases in jet traffic is considered.

In a webinar presented by AviationToday.com entitled The Troubled Status of Air Safety, Voss elaborated on the troubling statistics. “What's a little bit of a concern is that we've had a couple years that have been trending upward," he said. "…The current year doesn't look like a really great one so far. And so there could be a possibility that we really have a little bit of a structural turnaround in the number of accidents and the accident rate. If we continue more or less at this rate, we're getting back at the level of accidents we expected to have almost a decade ago. And keep in mind this is also occurring during a period of declining traffic year over year from over the last several years. It's tough to call it an aberration because, truthfully, we also had a very bad half of last year. We've been running major accidents on the order of between two weeks and a month apart. It's been a pretty rough spell for a while. Of course, everything can always trim down to statistical anomalies, but several years in a row is something to be concerned about.”

John Goglia, an independent air safety consultant and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), noted that “there's no common thread between any of those accidents. We have people problems, and we have what appears to be material problems and maybe some technology problems.”

Chris Baur, president of Consulting and Technical Services, Hughes Aerospace, added: “That’s probably one of the most perplexing parts of looking at this data and trying to say---Okay, well, what's happening here? Why are we seeing this? What can we do to turn it down, if you will?”

As regards the safety performance within the regional airline industry, Voss said the mainline air carriers are already working with their regional airline partners on raising the standards. “But I also see that we could do more about the relationship between the mainlines and the regional carriers. I think the suggestion that (FAA Administrator) Randy Babbitt made that there could be more best practices information exchanged, more mentoring, if you will, going on between these operators is absolutely correct. There's not just information data to be exchanged but knowledge to be exchanged as well,” added the aviation safety expert.

The crash of Colgan Flight 3407 threw a harsh spotlight on the issue of crew rest, a subject also addressed by the expert panel.

Stated Baur: “The airlines have been very proactive in working with the government to try to address some changes in crew rest. I know that you read in the papers about ‘zombie’ crews piloting aircraft. I don't feel that that is the case at all. I do think that there are some issues and, probably, some regulatory processes that need to be reviewed. But I think that it's being proactive of the air carriers that they're trying to come up with more up-to-date regulations towards crew rest and how long a crew can operate an airplane.”

Voss said change is coming. “The fact is that we've had some regulations in place that were really old regulations and highly simplistic regulations that didn't really anticipate things like ultra-long-range operations that the big mainline carriers have to deal with and never even imagined the existence of this regional feeder structure that we have today. And that's why the FAA has really drawn the line in the sand, They're going to make some decisions about moving to a far more appropriate type of system to govern crew rest.”

The panelists believe that despite a spate of high profile fatal accidents, air travel remains the preferred option.

Baur said “all of us today are probably on the road, coming back or about to go on a trip. And we're all pretty much traveling by air. I don't know when you took your last road trip, but it's far more dangerous to get in a car. Even train travel isn't safe. The safest way that you can move from point A to point B is by a commercial air carrier.

“While there has been an uptick in events, there hasn't been a common thread. And I don't think the sky is falling, if you will, in travel. And I do think travel is going to grow. Everybody seems to be in agreement with that. As the world grows and develops and the population expands, it is the travel mode of choice. That's how people want to be able to safely conduct business, reunite with loved ones, and all the things that we've come to enjoy because of commercial air travel. It's a key piece of our business,” he has concluded.

To hear the The Troubled Status of Air Safety click here.

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