Winston Aldworth: It's safer than ever to take to the skies

Annual safety reports show that there was just one accident involving a commercial airliner for every 4.4 million flights that in 2014. Photo / Thinkstock

Courtesy of MH370 and MH17, last year surely passed all records for the amount of newspaper headlines written around the world about aviation disasters. It was also a record year for the number of aviation crashes - as in, they recorded the lowest number of all time.

Figures released in the International Air Transport Association (IATA) annual safety report show that there was just one accident involving a commercial airliner for every 4.4 million flights that in 2014.

In the commercial aviation business they call them "hull losses" - a sterile term for such a grisly event - and there were 12 last year, compared with an average of 19 between 2009 and 2013.

But while hull losses decreased, the total number of deaths went up to 641 (239 of whom were aboard MH370). There were 210 fatalities in 2013, with a five-year average of 517 before last year.

(IATA's figures don't take into account MH17, the Malaysia Airlines 777 that was shot down over Ukraine. IATA coldly reasons that being shot down doesn't constitute an accident. That sounds specious to me and will come as cold comfort to the families of the 298 people who died aboard that aircraft.)

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The key point - and the thing IATA is happiest about: There were fewer accidents and fewer hull losses. And that's better for everyone. Flying is safer than ever.

Red light for the lynch mob

Another headline grabber: Stopping tourist drivers and taking their keys. We had plenty of responses to last week's editorial in which I suggested that maybe - just maybe - stopping tourists and taking their keys was dumb, dangerous, bad for business and more than a little presumptuous.

The thing this debate is lacking is some serious statistics. Ministry of Transport numbers tell us a foreign driver was identified as a factor in 13 per cent of fatal crashes on the West Coast, and five per cent of fatal crashes in Otago from 2004 to 2013.

But what such numbers don't tell us is how many foreign drivers are driving on our roads at any given time. If, on the West Coast, about 13 per cent of drivers are foreigners, then the crash stats would be no surprise.

Without that number, the debate lacks context.