As of 2023, deaths on commercial flights have fallen to just 17 per billion passengers, down from 50 per billion passengers the year before, according to the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization.
The missile-related fatalities far exceed the deadliest crashes of any airline carrier in the last 10 years, including the two 2019 Boeing 737 MAX crashes that claimed the lives of 346 people.
Five years later, a US Navy warship accidentally shot down an Iran Airbus over the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War, killing 290 people.
Wednesday’s attack in Kazakhstan, which claimed 38 lives, marks the third major missile strike on an airline carrier since 2014, according to the Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network (ANS), a non-profit that tracks incidents in the sky.
The wreckage of Azerbaijan Airlines flight JS-8243 remains under investigation, with images of the downed plane showing signs of shrapnel lodged in the aircraft.
The world went without a similar incident for nearly three decades until Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by Russian-backed forces in 2014, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew members.
Missile strikes against a civilian passenger plane was believed to be a Cold War fear after the first incident took place against a Korea Air Lines flight in 1983, with 269 people killed after inadvertently entering prohibited Soviet airspace.
“It would be incorrect to make any hypotheses before the investigation comes to conclusions, and we definitely cannot do it and no one should do it,” he said.