Please excuse me, or redirect me, if this has been discussed in its own thread or as part of the threads already posted on last year’s Southhwest 1380 engine failure and depressurization, in which a passenger was partially sucked through a broken window and died.
I read (cite lost) that the fatality “was the first aboard an airline in nine years.”
Which is a weird/interesting stat. I presume this includes natural causes such as heart attacks and the like (as well as people committing hara-kiri, hanging themselves, setting themselves on fire, or lighting a bomb to avoid a droning seatmate).
So how many died onboard since the beginning of commercial civilian aircraft? There must be a list, complete with causes of death; I would find one perversely interesting. I think.
There was the Aloha Air case, where the roof blew off and a flight attendant was sucked out and died. The pilots landed the plane safely, so not a crash.
As for the death of the passenger on Flight 1380, details are critical (my bold):
“The National Transportation Safety Board’s recommendations come after its investigation of Southwest Flight 1380, in April 2018, when a fan blade broke off one of the engines, punctured a three-pane window and sucked a passenger partly out of the plane briefly. The passenger, who was pulled back inside the aircraft by passengers, died, becoming the first accident-related fatality on a U.S. airline in almost a decade.”
It’s not particularly rare so I don’t think you’d find any stats. The airline I work for had a passenger die inflight recently and a pilot died a year or two back.
AFIK “crash” is a layman’s term, which I guess is being used here to mean an aircraft impacting terrain. The FAA and NTSB use the terms “incident” and “accident” and those have precise definitions. If the event resulted in a fatality*, it automatically meets the threshold of an accident regardless of whether or not the plane ultimately landed safely. It their eyes, Southhwest 1380, Aloha 243, and United 811 are all in the same category as Asiana 214, Swissair 111, etc. Since they’re not really categorized differently by the authorities, you’re probably not going to statistics on fatalities on airliners not resulting from a “crash”.
*Or more precisely, a fatality resulting from the aircraft or its operation. Obviously they’re not going to count things like people dying from heart attacks mid-flight, since the fact that it happened on a plane is merely incidental.
