World Meteorological Organization

The 2023 Safety Report of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) was published today, 28 February 2024, and is available for interactive online viewing here.

Through his involvement in IATA's Accident Classification Task Force (ACTF), Greg Brock, Head of WMO's Services for Aviation Division has directly contributed to the analysis of the 2023 accidents reflected in this latest report.

Here are some of the headlines:

• The all accident rate was 0.80 per million sectors in 2023 (one accident for every 1.26 million flights), an improvement from 1.30 in 2022 and the lowest rate in over a decade. This rate outperformed the five-year (2019-2023) rolling average of 1.19 (an average one accident for every 880,293 flights).
• The fatality risk improved to 0.03 in 2023 from 0.11 in 2022 and 0.11 for the five years, 2019-2023. At this level of safety, on average a person would have to travel by air every day for 103,239 years to experience a fatal accident.
• A single fatal accident occurred in 2023, on a turboprop aircraft, resulting in 72 fatalities. This is reduced from five fatal accidents in 2022 and an improvement on the five-year average (2019-2023) which was five.

The 60th edition of the Annual Safety Report (2023) includes further in-depth review and analysis of these and other global and regional aviation statistics, including those where adverse weather/meteorological conditions were a causal factor.

Indeed, weather/meteorological conditions - notably thunderstorms, low-level wind shear and hail - as well as unnecessary weather penetration and contaminated runway conditions featured in 2023 accidents classified by IATA, including those that resulted in in-flight damage, runway excursions and overruns, hard-landings and tail-strikes. While weather-related accidents did not (thankfully) result in a loss of life in 2023, they all resulted in economic losses for the aviation industry through damage to the aircraft.

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