The first half of 2024 landed the industry in an uncomfortable place. On paper commercial air transport remained statistically safe, but the month by month picture shows an uptick in fatal events and a worrying number of serious near-misses that should sharpen how operators and regulators prioritize risk reduction.

By mid-year there were four fatal accidents across commercial categories resulting in 11 deaths, and a string of high‑consequence near-miss events that, if a few variables had been different, would have produced many more fatalities. As pilots I want to be blunt. Numbers like these are not abstract. Each is a chain of decisions, system gaps, or degraded margins that we could have anticipated and acted on earlier.

Two incidents that illustrate the problem are instructive. In March a Safarilink Dash 8 departed Wilson Airport in Nairobi and collided with a Cessna 172 on a training flight. The turboprop returned and landed safely with no onboard injuries, but the Cessna crashed and both occupants were killed. This event is a reminder that mixed operations at busy uncontrolled or minimally controlled fields need strict traffic deconfliction and robust instructor and student procedures. Visual lookout and ATC advisories alone are not sufficient when traffic mixes fast departing turboprops with pattern work.

In May a long haul Boeing 777 operating as Singapore Airlines SQ321 encountered sudden, violent turbulence while cruising over southern Myanmar. The Singapore Transport Safety Investigation Bureau preliminary analysis shows rapid vertical acceleration changes that threw unbelted occupants into the cabin ceiling, producing many serious injuries and one passenger fatality. That episode exposes three brittle areas of current practice: reliance on imperfect turbulence detection and routing information, inconsistent adherence to seatbelt-on-while-seated discipline, and the challenge crews face when a significant weather cell develops quickly in convective regions.

Beyond the headline accidents the first half saw multiple instances where crews, controllers, or ATC procedures prevented disaster by a small margin. Flight International tallied roughly 900 passengers who were involved in a small number of close calls in that period. Those near-misses matter. They signal latent risks in surveillance, procedures, training, and situational awareness that are not captured by counting hull losses alone.

Operational lessons for crews and operators

  • Expect the unexpected with seatbelt discipline. Make the command to remain seated and belted a continuous safety culture message, not an announcement only at climb and descent. The SQ321 data are a clear example of how injuries and a fatality followed people being unrestrained during a short but violent G excursion.

  • Update and brief weather avoidance procedures for convective and mountain wave environments. Relying solely on ground weather products and standard radar vectors is insufficient in fast-developing convective zones. Use all available sources, including datalinked turbulence forecasts, PIREPs, and tactical rerouting when the weather picture is uncertain.

  • Reinforce mixed-operations risk controls at airports that host both training and commercial traffic. Procedural separation, stricter pattern management, and where feasible segregated traffic windows reduce the risk of conflicts similar to the Nairobi event. The Safarilink/Cessna collision shows visual lookout and routine ATC advisories can fail when traffic densities or pilot expectations diverge.

  • Practice high-fidelity upset and abnormal event recovery. Some of the near-misses could have turned catastrophic for crews unfamiliar with rapid manual control handover from autopilot during abrupt updrafts or system anomalies. Recurrent training should give crews muscle memory for these rare but high consequence maneuvers.

Regulatory and industry actions that would reduce the trend

  • Improve real-time turbulence detection and sharing. The industry has tools, but we need faster, coordinated dissemination of high-resolution convective and clear air turbulence data across operators and ATC. Regulators should incentivize adoption of enhanced turbulence forecasting and data sharing standards.

  • Strengthen runway and aerodrome traffic management in mixed-use fields. Air navigation authorities must review tower procedures, traffic advisories, and the allocation of arrival and departure corridors when training flights are active.

  • Push for non-punitive reporting and better close-call analytics. Near-misses contain the richest data for prevention. Encourage flight crews, controllers, and ground staff to report events without fear of reprisal and expand the analytical capacity to turn those reports into preventive interventions.

  • Revisit seatbelt and cabin safety messaging. Airlines should evaluate announcements, cabin routine, and even engineering fixes that make wearing seatbelts more comfortable and more consistently used whenever passengers are seated.

Where we go from here

Mid-year statistics are a snapshot, not a verdict. The aviation system today is still safer than it was decades ago, but safety is not an automatic outcome. It is the product of constant attention to detail, timely technology adoption, disciplined procedures, and honest reporting. The uptick in fatalities and the proliferation of severe near-misses in early 2024 should be treated as an early warning. Operators and regulators need to act now to convert those warnings into concrete, operational changes before the next set of statistics shows a worse trend.

As pilots and safety professionals we cannot accept small margins as normal. The people who fly with us deserve an industry that treats these mid-year alarms with the urgency they require.