Airline insurance claims
for plane accidents will drop below $1 billion this year for the first
time since 1991 as passenger fatalities and aircraft destroyed hit
record lows, advisory firm Ascend estimates.
Claims for aircraft
losses and legal liabilities this year will total about $980 million, or
$300 million less than last year, Ascend said in a report. Claims are
almost half the $1.8 billion in premiums written in the period, it said.
The
International Air Transport Association said earlier this month that
western-built jets suffered 0.19 “hull loss” accidents per million
flights this year through November as the industry headed to its safest
year on record. IATA’s figures didn’t reflect the Dec. 25 crash of an
Air Bagan Fokker 100 jet in Myanmar in which one person on board died
and the out-of-production aircraft was destroyed.
“Airline fatal
accident rates have been steadily improving and, on average, operations
are now twice as safe as they were 15 years ago,” Paul Hayes, head of
safety at Ascend said in a statement. “With such a benign insurance
claims year and increasing capacity in the market, we believe that
premium income will continue to fall in 2013.”
There is concern
premium levels are “too low to be able to maintain the market in the
longer term,” Hayes said. Premiums have declined for three years and for
2012 were more than $800 million below the 2003 level when they reached
$2.7 billion, the highest in the last 10 years.
Africa Improvements
In the first
11 months of this year, North Asian and North American carriers had the
lowest accident rates and African carriers had the highest, according to
IATA.
Measures being introduced in Africa to improve pilot
training and enhance safety audits are designed to help bring airline
safety in the region in line with current global standards by 2015,
Guenther Matschnigg, IATA’s senior vice president for safety, said on
Dec. 13.
The June 3 crash of a Dana Air MD-80 in Nigeria was the
deadliest accident this year, killing 153 people on-board and 10 on the
ground, Ascend said. Of the four deadliest accidents in 2012, in which
almost 90 percent of all fatalities occurred, two were in Africa, it
said.
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