No commercial jets fatally crashed anywhere in the world in 2017, making it the safest year on record for the aviation industry, The Independent reports.
By comparison, 217 people died in fatal airplane events in 2016, 471 people died in 2015, and 864 people died in 2014. In 2017, just 13 people died in airplane crashes, and even then exclusively on small turbo-prop aircrafts, Dutch aviation consultancy To70 found. Other fatal airplane crashes, including one that killed 12 people in Costa Rica on Sunday, did not count toward the overall total because the plane did not meet the study's threshold of weighing at least 5,700 kilograms.
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