By Emily Tamkin | The Washington Post
Ethiopian Airlines announced Sunday morning that all 157 people on a flight that crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, had been killed.
In the past year, accidents involving passenger planes have killed hundreds — a stark contrast from 2017.
There were no deaths in commercial jet accidents in 2017, making it the safest year on record for commercial air travel. President Donald Trump even sent out a tweet taking credit for airline safety.
But more than 500 people were killed in passenger plane accidents in 2018. Airline safety groups providing the data stress that fatal crashes are nevertheless rare and commercial flights remain one of the safest forms of travel.
The following lists the deadly air crashes that occurred last year:
- February 2018: A Russian plane crashed shortly after taking off from Moscow. The plane was headed to a city near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan. Over 70 people died.
- February 2018: Sixty-five people were killed when a twin-engine turboprop flown by Aseman Airlines went down in southern Iran. Later in 2018, the imposition of U.S. sanctions on Iran – including the prohibition on the sale of planes to the country – had some concerned that air travelers in Iran would be at risk because of aging planes and technology.
- March 2018: More than 50 people were killed when a US-Bangla Airlines flight from Dhaka, Bangladesh, crashed at the airport in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. Investigators attributed the crash to the captain suffering an “emotional breakdown” during the flight.
- May 2018: More than 100 people died when a Boeing 737 leased by the Mexican company Damojh to Cuba’s national airline, Cubana, crashed shortly after taking off from Havana.
- October 2018: A Boeing 737 Max crashed not long after departing from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board. Investigators later found that the plane, part of Lion Air, should never have left the ground. Technical problems had previously been reported.
In March, relatives of the some of the victims of the Lion Air crash sued Boeing. The suit points the blame at the new flight-control system on the 737 Max. The Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed Sunday was the same Boeing 737 Max 8 model.