A Caspian Airlines flight carrying 168 people crashed north of Tehran on Wednesday, killing everyone on board. It was the latest in a recent spate of airline crashes that have surely unnerved those with a fear of flying. But do these unrelated incidents actually tell us anything about aviation safety?
Aviation experts noted that the jet was a Tupolev Tu-154, a creaky old Soviet-era aircraft responsible for three wrecks in Iran over the last seven years. But age may not be the problem. Steve Lott, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association (IATA), told NEWSWEEK, "It has been proven time and again that there is no link between fleet age and accident rate."
Turns out, it's not how old the plane is that determines the safety of your flight, but where the plane was made and where it's operated, according to an IATA report. The association indexes aircraft accident rates by region of manufacture and region of operation. Companies like America's Boeing, Europe's Airbus, and even Brazil's Embraer are considered Western-built jets. Makers like Tupolev are of the Eastern-built variety, which are almost all designed in the former Soviet republics or China.
The IATA data show that Western-built jets crash at a rate of .81, which means that there is one loss per 1.2 million flights; among turboprops, the number is 2.43. Eastern-built planes are not broken down among plane type (jets and props are calculated together), but in any case the crash rate is a whopping 12.11, which works out to one accident per 83,000 flights.
Obviously correlation does not prove causality (the Caspian Air flight didn't crash because it was made in Russia). And where you fly also has an even greater impact on air safety, since some countries have stricter regulations, more sophisticated aviation infrastructure, and better air-control systems than others. In fact, usually those are the very places where Eastern-built aircraft are operated, which is why parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the former Soviet republics remain more dangerous places to fly. It's worth putting all these safety qualms in perspective: if you were to take one flight each day on an Eastern-built aircraft, you could expect to go, on average, 226 years without incident. But, statistically speaking, odds say you're better off steering clear of planes that carry a MADE IN RUSSIA label.