Air transport incidents on the decline

Much of the Australian media has been awash with Qantas turnback stories over the past month but the statistics from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau tell a different story.

During the past six weeks, Qantas has suffered about eight turnbacks but there was almost no coverage of the other 15 involving other domestic airlines and international carriers into Australia.

While formal figures for January are yet to be released, in 2022 there were 2,273 incidents involving commercial air transport aircraft. Bird strikes, of which there were 926, was the largest single issue.

Of those, 126 were in Western Australia, mostly in the north-west.

Next came 'technical' at 697 and then 'operational' with 684.

Technical issues are typically on ground and just require the replacement of a part, while operational concerns are usually in flight.

Balancing those figures are the number of domestic and international flights in Australian airspace, which were just over 800,000 last year, translating to one incident every 351 flights.

Most incidents are minor in nature and could be as simple as a mix up in air-to-air communication or faulty paperwork.

However, every incident, no matter how minor, is reported in Australia.

The number of incidents has been declining despite the number of flights increasing.

Ten years ago, there were just over 4,000 incidents.

Bringing the numbers into a WA context, there were 133 incidents in 2022 according to the ATSB and the biggest single issue were warning lights at 37, most of which turned out to be faulty lights, not the actual aircraft system.

Next was fumes at 29, mostly relating to engine or galley smells. None were serious.

Taking a global perspective per year, there are 43 million flights and 10,000 turnbacks.

On average, Qantas mainline has 60 a year, which is just over one a week (and below the international average).