This was the 18 fatal plane crashes in 2022 in the world

Except in China, whose sector will gradually recover in the coming weeks, the world has returned to normality after two years of stoppage and recovery.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
28 December 2022 Wednesday 21:31
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This was the 18 fatal plane crashes in 2022 in the world

Except in China, whose sector will gradually recover in the coming weeks, the world has returned to normality after two years of stoppage and recovery. This 2022, commercial aviation has once again demonstrated its safety despite having suffered some accidents throughout these twelve months.

Most of the 18 in which regular, charter and air taxi or air cargo passenger planes were involved were from small airlines. There was only one accident with more than a hundred deaths, that of a Chinese Boeing 737, while the only Airbus involved in fatal accidents were due to surprising situations at airports. In this text we review everyone's circumstances.

On March 21, the worst accident of the year by number of victims occurred: 132 people died in China when a China Eastern Boeing 737 traveling from Kunming to Guangzhou lost contact with the control center while descending at excessive speed and fell into a small village in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The impact against the ground was so violent that the 123 passengers and nine crew died instantly.

On May 29, a small twin-engine Twin Otter was in a fatal accident. This time the setting was Nepal. The plane departed from Pokhara, 200 kilometers west of Kathmandu, the capital. With all its seats filled with passengers, cargo and three crew members on board, the aircraft departed for Jomsom, one of the country's many mountainous airports that impress anyone unaccustomed to flying in the area.

The valley where it is located, at 2,700 meters above sea level, was heavily covered. Trying an approach, flying close to the slopes of the mountains, the calculations were wrong and the plane crashed when one of the wings brushed against the ground. All 22 occupants of the Canadian-built aircraft died on impact.

The Union of Comoros, the group of three islands in southeastern Africa, was the scene of the first fatal accident in world commercial aviation in 2022. On February 26, the person involved was a single-engine AB Aviation, a small local regional airline, which turn is the main one in the country. On a flight of just over 100 kilometers between Moroni and Mohéli-Bandar es Eslam, the Cessna Caravan was just over two miles from its destination when it plunged into the ocean. Its 14 occupants died there: two pilots and 12 passengers.

Nearly three months later, on May 11, another robust de Havilland Twin Otter crashed in Cameroon. The plane was carrying personnel from the Cameroon Oil Transportation Company, a company owned by the American Exxon and Chevron, together with the Malaysian Petronas. The plane took off from a field where an oil pipeline was being built. It was carrying nine technicians and two pilots for a two-hour flight to Yaoundé, the country's political capital. The device never arrived and crashed in the central region flying in visual conditions when the weather was quite compromised. All Cotco employees along with the two pilots died, totaling 11 people.

On September 10, a small Antonov 28 was flying from Bukavu-Kavumu to Kasese, both towns in the Congo, on a cargo trip with three occupants. The usual maneuver of turning after takeoff to gain height and overcome some nearby hills was not carried out. It was due to the abundance of clouds in the area and the plane went directly into one of these, all dying. Two months later, in the first days of November and in the Republic of the Congo, a Let410 twin-engine that was carrying out a cargo service between the towns of Kasese and Goma, crashed for unknown reasons 100 kilometers from the departure airport. The three occupants did not survive the impact.

The third most serious accident of 2022 was with Precision Air, the largest airline in Tanzania. It was on November 6 during an internal flight between Dar es Salaam, the financial center of the country, and Bukoba, next to Lake Victoria. The aircraft was an ATR42, a successful Franco-Italian built regional aircraft. This had 43 passengers and four crew members on board on a regular flight. Bad weather in the arrival region reduced visibility to a minimum and the pilots attempted to land up to three times. In the last one, they even made it to land. The plane was already flying so low on the apparently final approach that they fell into the water before reaching the runway. After hours of uncertainty and a complicated rescue operation, the final number of deaths was 19: two crew members and 17 travelers.

With Ukraine, already in the middle of the war due to the Russian invasion, an Antonov 26 of Constanta Airline, an aviation company based in Zaporizhia, left the airport of this city in a positional flight, with an empty hold and three occupants, to pick up a load indeterminate in Úzhgorod, a city very close to the border of Slovakia and Hungary with Ukraine. Almost immediately after takeoff, the plane collided with some high-voltage cables that destabilized it and it was unable to take off, falling less than 10 kilometers from the perimeter of the departure airport. Of the three crew members, only one lost his life in an accident that went largely unnoticed due to the escalation of the war in the country.

On June 21, another Antonov was in a fatal accident. This time it was an AN-2 model, the largest single-engine in the world. The information was always confusing about the circumstances in which a Russian Techservice device transported a thousand kilos of cargo and a passenger from Yakutsk to the Kobyaysky district. Sometimes, these accidents and incidents bring to the surface not only evidence of lack of maintenance in some regions of the world, but also serious problems with some crew members. In this case, the authorities in charge of the investigation discovered that the flight commander had his license expired, while the co-pilot had no official documentation to be able to work in the sector. For his part, the passenger, the only survivor of the three, declared that the plane entered a foggy area and ended up crashing in Yakutia, within the Sakha Republic.

On July 16, a crash of a Ukrainian cargo plane in Greece brought to light the risks of transporting hazardous materials on flights, such as ammunition, on apparently normal flights. It was a noisy Antonov overnight voyage that had taken off from Serbia bound for Jordan and possibly continued on to Bangladesh, a detail that was never entirely clear.

An engine failure forced the pilots to return desperately to Greece when they were already flying over the sea and had left that country behind. They could not reach the runway where they had planned an emergency landing and crashed in Antifilippi, a town of 1,000 inhabitants that experienced possibly the worst night in its recent history due to fears due to the noise of an accident in which the eight occupants of the Antonov registered in Ukraine and the uncertainty about what could be transported by that plane that burned in an exaggerated way. Finally, after the work of firefighters and the army in the area of ​​the incident, it was reported that there was no danger to the population of the area.

On April 13, a Cessna Caravan was flying cargo service between Salt Lake City, Utah, and Burley, a small town in Idaho, USA. Piloted by a single aviator, the plane attempted a first landing at the destination airport and frustrated the maneuver. On the second occasion and in full snowfall, the plane ended up crashing into one of the six large chimneys of a factory, the only occupant dying on impact.

On June 22, six people lost their lives in Venezuela aboard an air taxi operated by a Learjet 55C business jet. It was flying between the city of Puerto Cabello and Charalallave, near Caracas. The jet, with four passengers and two pilots on board, indicated by radio that it had problems with the reversals of the engines, devices that slow down the plane on the ground and whose activation in flight can be fatal. During the second attempt to land at the destination airport, the device deviated from its path and ended up crashing in a wooded area, where its six occupants died. One of these was the businessman Christian Toni, president of Estudiantes de Mérida, one of the main soccer teams in the country.

On the first day of July, another Learjet model jet had an accident in Argentina. The device, a veteran lear35 of the operator Flying America SA, a company specializing in executive, cargo and medical flights, had been chartered to carry out an air ambulance service and was taking off back to its base in San Fernando, northwest of Buenos Aires. , with two pilots, a doctor and a nurse on board. When taking flight in Rio Grande, one of the reactors failed, the aircraft destabilized and was unable to rise, falling in the military zone of the airport and the four occupants dying.

On September 4, a seaplane with a pilot and nine passengers was flying from Friday Harbor, a tourist destination in the San Juan Islands in the state of Washington, United States, to Renton, south of Seattle. The aircraft, a single-engine turbocharged De Havilland Otter, fell into Puget Sound, sinking. The pilot's body was recovered immediately, although the passengers and the plane remained sunk for several days at the bottom of the waters.

Finally, a Cessna Caravan from the Brazilian company Piquiatuba was involved in an accident on September 10 when, shortly after taking off from Oriximiná, its only engine failed. This forced him to land by law in which one of the two pilots and the three passengers died: two dentists and a health worker who were flying to the remote Ayaramã airstrip, where there is an indigenous settlement, to carry out their assistance work. They never arrived.

Four days later, a Peruvian Jetstream 32 from the Saeta company, the operator specialized in the Peruvian Amazon region, was flying between San Antonio del Estrecho and Iquitos on a scheduled trip with 15 passengers on board and two pilots on duty. During takeoff the plane did not have enough power, it used the entire runway and left on the opposite side. All the occupants ended up injured to various degrees and one of the passengers ended up dying in the hospital.

The strangest deaths of 2022 related to commercial aviation happened on September 2 at the Ahmed Sékou Touré International Airport, which serves Conakry, the capital of the Republic of Guinea in West Africa. An Airbus A320 from the Portuguese TAP landed there at night on a scheduled flight from Lisbon with 73 passengers and six crew members. During the landing, a motorcycle appeared with two people rolling down the runway with the misfortune that they collided with the number 2 engine, the right one, both locals dying. No one on board was harmed.

The last fatal accident of the year related to commercial aviation was a series of coincidences. It happened at the Jorge Chávez airport in Lima, Peru. While a Latam Airbus A320neo was taking off to fly to Juliaca, a fire truck crossed the plane on the runway. The speed of both made the collision of the land vehicle against the engine of the device brutal, destroying the truck and the bodies of the two firefighters who were in its cabin. His truck and two others were carrying out a quick reaction exercise and inexplicably entered the active runway without informing airport controllers, who are the only ones who can authorize entry or access to critical areas of the airfield. The plane was unable to take off and was stopped half a kilometer beyond the point of impact. There was no damage on board.

Although no death is ever acceptable, 2022 closes as a more than reasonable year in aviation safety, an unstoppable trend if we compare accidents and incidents with the number of flights, people and goods that have moved through the skies of the world in commercial aircraft this year. .