MIAMI.- He 2024 closes with a lethal plane crash southwest of South Korea, which makes it the year deadliest for global commercial aviation since 2018, with a toll of 217 dead and multiple injuries, just last weekend.
This year plane passenger deaths rose to 318 with the accident of Juju Air Co., in Muan, southwest of South Korea, and with the downing of an Azerbaijan Airlines commercial plane, in Kazakhstan, according to data from the aviation analysis company, Cirium.
This would be the highest number of deaths in air accidents recorded since 2018, when More than 500 people lost their lives.
Although fatal air incidents remain very rare today, an event of this type can quickly become one of the worst air tragedies of the year and history.
Most tragic plane crashes of 2024
The South Korean plane crash, recorded on December 28, was the most tragic and deadly of 2024. 179 of the 181 passengers on board died in this event.
Although the real causes of the incident are still unknown, it is estimated that it could have been a product of the Juju Air Boeing 737-800 crash with a possible bird, which affected the landing gear when it was preparing to touch down.
The emergency landing ended up being awkward, as it did not have the landing gear deployed, which caused it to crash into a concrete wall, becoming the worst air disaster in the history of the Asian country and one of the deadliest in the world. .
What other accidents were recorded this year?
This year began with a plane crash in Japanon January 2, when a Japan Airlines plane arriving from Sapporo collided with a coastal patrol plane at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.
Although the passengers of the commercial airline managed to survive, five of the six Coast Guard members died. Only the captain of the Dash-8 made it out alive..
In that incident, 17 of the 367 passengers and 12 flight crew on the Japan Airlines were injured.
Another of the deadly flights that 2024 had was recorded on July 24, at the Tribhuvan International Airport, in Kathmandu, Nepal, when a plane from Saurya Airlines crashed during takeoff.
The accident left 18 of the 19 crew members dead. All of them, company employees.
A sinister closure
On August 9 of this year, an ATR 72-500 plane of the Voepass Linhas Aéreas also crashed, when it spiraled out of the sky, after encountering icy weather conditions, impacting a residential area in Brazil.
The flight, which was going from the Coronel Adalberto Mendes da Silva Airport, Cascavel, Paraná, to the São Paulo-Guarulhos International Airport, lost control, leaving 62 people dead, including 58 passengers and four crew members.
This year has a sinister end for aviation, with seven accidents in the last week, only two of them being the deadliest: those in South Korea and Kazakhstan, which added up to 217 deaths in 72 hours.
On December 25, 38 people died who were aboard Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer SA 190 flight J2-8243, which had almost completed its journey from Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, to Grozny, Russia, when it crashed during an attempted emergency landing in Kazakhstan, after experience technical problems.
According to investigations, the commercial plane was shot down by accident by the Russian anti-aircraft system, which would have mistaken it for a Ukrainian drone.
Although Russia has not confirmed this hypothesis, Russian President Vladimir Putin apologized on Saturday to his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliev, and admitted that anti-aircraft fire had been fired on the day of the tragedy due to a Ukrainian drone attack, although not acknowledged that it hit the Azerbaijani plane.
