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Missiles Are Now the Biggest Killer of Airline Passengers
Passenger flights are extraordinarily safe—except near conflicts, which are spreading
Preliminary results of an investigation indicate the jetliner that crashed this week in Kazakhstan was hit by Russian fire.
Preliminary results of an investigation indicate the jetliner that crashed this week in Kazakhstan was hit by Russian fire.
By Daniel Michaels and Benjamin Katz
Updated Dec. 27, 2024
Jetliners being accidentally blasted out of the sky has become the leading cause of commercial-aviation deaths over recent years, marking a new trend running counter to an otherwise improving safety picture.
The crash Wednesday of an Azerbaijan Airlines jetliner in Kazakhstan, if officially confirmed as a shootdown, would be the third major fatal downing of a passenger jet linked to armed conflict since 2014, according to the Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network, a global database of accidents and incidents. The tally would bring to more than 500 the number of deaths from such attacks during that period.
Preliminary results of Azerbaijan’s investigation into the crash indicate the plane was hit by a Russian antiaircraft missile, or shrapnel from it, said people briefed on the probe.
“It adds to the worrying catalog of shootdowns now,” said Andy Blackwell, an aviation risk adviser at security specialist ISARR and former head of security at Virgin Atlantic. “You’ve got the conventional threats, from terrorists and terrorist groups, but now you’ve got this accidental risk as well.”
At least 38 people were killed after the plane was likely hit by a Russian antiaircraft missile or shrapnel from it, people briefed on the initial investigation said.
No other cause of aviation fatalities on commercial airliners comes close to shootdowns over those years, according to ASN data. The deadliness of such attacks is a dramatic shift: In the preceding 10 years, there were no fatal shootdowns of scheduled commercial passenger flights, ASN data show.
The trend highlights the difficulty—if not impossibility—of protecting civilian aviation in war zones, even for rigorous aviation regulators, because of the politics of war. Early last century similar woes plagued sea travel, when belligerents targeted ocean transport.
Increasing civilian aviation deaths from war also reflect both a growing number of armed conflicts internationally and the increasing prevalence of powerful antiaircraft weaponry. If a missile was indeed the cause of this week’s disaster, it would mean that the three deadliest shootdowns of the past decade all involved apparently unintended targetings of passenger planes flying near conflict zones, by forces that had been primed to hit enemy military aircraft.
Two of those incidents were linked to Russia: Wednesday’s crash of an Embraer E190 with 67 people aboard, of whom 38 died, and the midair destruction in 2014 of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flying over a battle zone in Ukraine, on which all 298 people aboard died.
The other major downing was the mistaken shooting in 2020 by Iranian forces of a Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 departing Tehran, killing all 176 people onboard. Iran’s missile defense systems had been on alert for a potential U.S. strike at the time.
The string of inadvertent mass killings offers a chilling reminder that in battle situations, distinguishing foe from friend, or simply assessing threats, often requires split-second decisions based on incomplete information. Those judgments are frequently made by frightened, agitated or overexcited soldiers. During combat, friendly-fire attacks—where forces accidentally strike comrades—are a constant danger.
In the latest such incident, U.S. forces aboard the USS Gettysburg in the Red Sea on Dec. 22 accidentally shot down a U.S. Navy F/A-18 jet fighter from the same carrier group. Both crewmen in the jet ejected safely. The incident is under investigation.
Aviation-security experts, pilots and families of aircraft crash victims have been warning about the risk to civilian aircraft both from the Ukraine war and amid the escalating conflict in the Middle East, during which long-range missiles have been fired across busy flight corridors.
In October, for example, Iran’s unannounced strike against Israel caught off guard hundreds of commercial jets traveling through the air corridor separating the two states. Passengers in cabins captured footage of missiles launching, while pilot radios and air-traffic-control frequencies were filled with warnings about nearby launches.
Data from aviation tracking specialist Flightradar24 showed multiple Iranian aircraft taking off in the minutes preceding that attack, indicating that even local airlines weren’t informed before the strike. Governments in the region only started issuing formal airspace closures about half an hour after the strike started.
Israel’s military typically coordinates strikes with air-traffic controllers, but it has regularly targeted sites at or near airports in recent months, including a building that separates two runways at Beirut’s airport last month. On Thursday, Israel struck a Houthi target at San’a International Airport in Yemen. On Friday, the Yemeni rebels fired a missile at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, which Israel intercepted.
Shooting unarmed commercial aircraft isn’t a new phenomenon. In 1983, a Soviet fighter plane shot down a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 that had strayed into Soviet airspace during a tense period of the Cold War, killing all 269 onboard. Soviet authorities believed it was a military flight.
Five years later, during the Iran-Iraq War, crew on the USS Vincennes, a U.S. Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iran Air Airbus A300, killing all 290 people on the plane.
Earlier this century, shootdowns diminished and civilian aviation safety overall improved materially. Airliners are among the safest means of travel today.
Over the period since Russian-backed forces in July 2014 shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, the only other single cause directly linked to hundreds of commercial-aviation deaths was design flaws in Boeing’s 737 MAX jetliners. Two crashes within five months that together claimed 346 lives were blamed on the problems, which led to a global grounding of the aircraft in 2019. Boeing and regulators say those issues are now remedied.
Aviation accidents are sometimes described as being caused by pilot error or other broad descriptions of events, but to investigators and aviation regulators who want to understand events in detail so that underlying causes can be addressed, such sweeping categories offer little insight.
Commercial aviation has grown far safer precisely because chronic dangers have been repeatedly identified and addressed. The industry has widely adopted a no-blame approach to reporting problems and investigating accidents so that systemic risks can be addressed, without fear of reprisals, rather than ignored or hidden.
Fatalities on scheduled commercial flights last year fell to 17 people per billion passengers flown, down from 50 people per billion passengers in 2022, according to the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization, punctuating a broader trend in recent decades that shows traveling by commercial jet is getting safer. The accident rate, for example, dropped to 1.87 per million departures last year from 2.05 per million departures in 2022.
Still, the proliferation of major conflicts has renewed concerns from aviation security experts about how governments can successfully navigate the safety of civilian aircraft alongside the pressure to keep the timing and strategy of military strikes secret, and the economic impact of closing airspace.
Airlines similarly have to balance safety risk assessments with the financial burden of canceling operations or rerouting their aircraft over safer, but longer, flight paths.
Little, meanwhile, has been achieved in efforts to standardize rules for commercial flights operating in war zones, despite renewed efforts led by Canada after the downing in 2020 of Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 from Tehran, in which 85 Canadian citizens and residents were among the dead.
“A lot of operators and regulators didn’t seem to learn the lessons from MH-17,” said Jamie Thornback, a partner at Vancouver-based CFM Lawyers who represents families of passengers who died on the 2020 flight. Amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iran at the time, “most regulators were watching but didn’t do anything,” he said.
Airlines, for example, rely on a hodgepodge of information when determining whether it is safe to operate a flight, spanning advisories and restrictions from aviation safety regulators, input from national intelligence agencies, advice from private security companies and analysis by in-house teams.
The inconsistent advice and intelligence leave some airlines equipped to navigate risks, and others more exposed to human error.
For instance, court proceedings following Iran’s downing of PS752 disclosed that most of the carrier’s security team had been off to celebrate Orthodox Christmas. The team on duty missed a warning earlier that morning from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration about an increased risk of operations over Iran.
Canada’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday urged Russia to allow an “open and transparent investigation” into this week’s crash, and to accept the probe’s findings.
“Canada is deeply concerned by reports that Russian Air Defence Forces may have fired a missile on Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 causing it to crash land,” the ministry said on X.
Pilots have also clashed with some airlines over operations. In recent months, crews at a handful of European labor unions have expressed concerns about being asked to fly to destinations in the Middle East and flight routes that pass through corridors over areas like Iraq, according to letters reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Pilots have also requested that life-insurance policies be updated, many of which provided by airlines don’t pay out in the case of an accidental downing while operating over war zones.
“Crews are concerned and stressed by the fact that they are flying to and over conflict zones,” Otjan de Bruijn, president of the European Cockpit Association, wrote in a letter to the European Commission over the summer. “The instability and the tension in the region are high and attacks are unpredictable.”
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