At least in the air, the last calendar year was the world?s safest for 43 years, with the lowest number of reported air crashes, according to the Geneva-based independent watchdog, the Aircraft Crashes Record Office

(ACRO).
The ACRO reported yesterday that there were 156 crashes last year, compared with 178 in 2005, with 1,292 fatalities – a welcome fall of 11% on 2005.
Almost a third of all crashes occurred in North America last year, with 45 reported in the US and the number of people killed in airline accidents in the US rising from 75 in 2005 to 142 last year, according to the ACRO web site.
?The good news? if it can be seen that way is that 75% of all accidents last year involved smaller, propeller-powered planes and not major passenger airlines. However, the deadliest accident of 2006 involved a Tupolev TU-154 in Ukraine last August when 170 people lost their lives.
Sadly, this year appears to have started off badly with the reported disappearance in Indonesia two days ago of a passenger jet carrying 102 people on an internal flight between Surabaya in east Java to Manado in north Sulawesi.
(The aforementioned report can be found at: www.baaa-acro.com/index.html).