With two major passenger plane crashes late last year, 2024 officially closed as the deadliest year in commercial aviation since 2018.
The first incident was an Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan on December 25, killing at least 38 of the 67 people on board.
An American official said CNN: that initial indications are that the Russian anti-aircraft system may have shot down the passenger plane.
Reuters: It also reported that the plane was shot down by a Russian air defense system, citing multiple unnamed Azerbaijani sources about the investigation.
In a second incident, only two of the 181 people on board South Korea’s Jeju Air survived when a passenger jet made an emergency landing at an airport in the country’s southwest on December 29.
The plane skidded off the runway at Muan International Airport on its belly before bursting into flames.The two survivors, a man and a woman, escaped from the tail section, the only part of the plane that remained intact, emergency services said.
It was the deadliest aviation disaster to hit South Korea since 1997, according to records CNN:.
Figures compiled by Cirium show that the number of passenger plane fatalities last year rose to 318 as a result of these two recent crashes.
This is the highest death toll of 2018, with more than 500 people killed in 2018, a year marked by the first of two Boeing 737 Max crashes.
The South Korean government has announced that it will conduct nationwide inspections of all Boeing 737-800 aircraft following the fatal crash at Muan International Airport.
The “Azerbaijan Airlines” incident is also still under investigation.