Aviation accidents and incidents

An aviation accident is defined in the International Civil Aviation Organization Annex 13. It is roughly defined as an occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft which takes place between the time any person boards the aircraft with the intention of flight and all such persons have disembarked, in which a person is fatally or seriously injured, the aircraft sustains damage or structural failure and/or the aircraft is missing or is completely inaccessible. An aviation incident is also defined as an occurrence other than an accident, associated with the operation of an aircraft, which affects or could affect the safety of operations.

The first known aviation fatalities — the deaths of balloonists Pilâtre de Rozier and Pierre Romain on 15 June 1785.

Since the birth of flight, aircraft have crashed, often with serious consequences. This is because of the unforgiving nature of flight, where a relatively insubstantial medium, air, supports a significant mass. Should this support fail, there is limited opportunity for a positive outcome. Because of this, aircraft design is concerned with minimizing the chance of failure, and pilots are trained with safety a primary consideration. Despite this, accidents still occur, though statistically flying is the safest form of transportation. In fact, the relative rarity of incidents, coupled with the often dramatic outcome, is one reason why they still make headline news. Nevertheless, while the odds of actually getting caught in a plane crash are nowadays distinctly low compared to other means of transportation, the chances of dying in such a disaster are notably higher.

	Many early attempts at flight ended in failure when a design raised to a height for a launch would fail to generate enough lift and crash to the ground. Some of the earliest aviation pioneers lost their lives testing aircraft they built.
US Army Lt. Thomas Selfridge became the first person killed in a powered fixed-wing aircraft on September 17, 1908 when his aircraft, piloted by Orville Wright, crashed after propeller separation failure during military tests at Fort Myer in Virginia. Selfridge died of a fractured skull. Wright suffered broken ribs, pelvis and a leg.

Plane crashes with large numbers of casualties set in with the early passenger flights of the 1920s. The yearly death toll of plane crashes exceeded 100 for the first time in 1928, and 1,000 for the first time in 1943. Since 1945, the number of deaths has remained below 1,000 only twice, in 2004 and 2007.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-27