29 - Air accidents
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2023
Summary
This is a sub-category of deaths due to external causes (Map 5) and includes deaths from powered and unpowered aircraft (for example, gliders, hot air balloons).
Note that we are mapping where people were living at the time of their death, not their actual location of death. The cluster of high SMRs in the north of Scotland reflects the use of small aircraft to travel between remote places and islands. Almost nine out of ten of these deaths are of males, probably reflecting the fact that men vastly outnumber women as both civilian and military pilots.
Air accidents are a very rare cause of death, but because air crashes often have dramatic outcomes, when they do occur they garner a lot of attention. Take-off and landing are the times when air accidents are most likely to occur. The majority of aircraft accidents are of private planes and helicopters.
In the UK the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, an independent part of the Department for Transport, investigates all civilian air crashes.
Although the amount of air traffic has been expanding in recent years, the number of air accidents fell to an all-time low in 2007 (The Times, 3 January 2008). Europe is the safest continent for air travel. The well-known maxim that flying is the safest form of transport for travelling long distances is indeed correct.
Thomas Selfridge was the first person to die in an air accident, in Virginia, USA, in 1908. Orville Wright survived the crash.
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- Information
- The Grim Reaper's Road MapAn Atlas of Mortality in Britain, pp. 60 - 61Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2008