The air crash figures were included in IATA's Safety Report 2020 which found the number of accidents fell as passenger demand plunged by 77 per cent due to Covid-19 but the accident rate increased slightly.
In 2020, the accident rate increased to 1.71 per million sectors from 1.11 in 2019 and the industry's fatality risk increased from 0.09 in 2019 to 0.13 last year.
The industry has been ravaged by Covid-19 and just over 22 million flights were operated last year, which is about the same number as were flown in the 1990s.
Commercial flights tracked worldwide fell about 53 per cent.
In 2020, there were 38 accidents versus 52 in 2019. The number of fatal accidents decreased from eight accidents in 2019 to five in 2020. The number of fatalities fell from 240 in 2019 to 132 in 2020. The fatalities came mainly from two crashes.
In May, a Pakistan International Airlines aircraft crashed in a residential area near the Karachi Airport killing 97 people, including one on the ground, and in August an Air India Express aircraft overshot a runway at Kozhikode and 21 died.
The figures don't include unlawful acts so excludes the shooting down last January of a Ukraine International Airlines by Iran's Revolutionary Guards shortly after it took off from Tehran Airport.
Captain Rubén Morales, chair of associations classification technical group, said 2020 had been an unprecedented year and the safety statistics had been distorted.
"When we look at the contributing factors present in 2020 accidents, manual handling is at top of the contributing factors associated with flight crew errors."
Other areas of concern are deficient safety management systems, regulatory oversight, and selection systems, all of them latent conditions present in the system before the accident happened.
"These latent conditions have been present consistently year after year, highlighting the need for improvement in these areas."
He said the scale-up of operations during aviation's recovery posed a risk.
"There will be a big challenge ahead to reactivate thousands of grounded aircraft, managing the qualifications and readiness of millions of licensed personnel and dealing with a major drain of experienced workers."
Over the last decade, the industry continued its 10-year trend of declining fatal accident rates and fatality risk. In 2011, there were 22 fatal accidents that resulted in 492 fatalities. Over the past five years, there have been an average of eight fatal accidents per year for commercial aircraft (passengers and cargo) resulting in 222 fatalities annually.
In 2017, aviation had its safest year on record with only 19 deaths and no fatal passenger jet accidents.
