While the number of global jet accident rates had reached an all-time low and the number of fatal accidents declined to a five-year low, the number of fatalities from aircraft accidents globally had spiked during 2014, delivering a year of contrasts, the International Air Transport Association (Iata) said on Monday.

Iata’s latest commercial aviation safety performance report showed that 12 fatal aviation accidents involving all aircraft types – but excluding the shooting down in July of Malaysian airliner MH17 over Ukraine – resulted in 641 fatalities last year.

This compared with 210 fatalities from 16 fatal crashes in 2013 and the five-year average of 517 deaths emerging from an average of 19 accidents during the period from 2009 to 2013.

“While aviation safety was in the headlines in 2014, the data show that [the aviation industry] continues to improve its safety performance," Iata director-general and CEO Tony Tyler said.

The shooting down of MH17 – which had been carrying 298 people – by anti-aircraft weaponry was not included as an accident under globally recognised accident classification criteria.

The loss of Malaysian airliner MH370 in March last year was classified as one of the 12 fatal accidents of 2014, despite the reasons for the aeroplane’s disappearance and loss still remaining unknown.

“In 2014, we saw a reduction in the number of fatal accidents – and that would be true even if we were to include MH17 in the total,” said Tyler, pointing out that more than 3.3-billion people flew safely on 38-million flights – 30.6-million by jet and 7.4-million by turboprop – in the year under review.

The number of accidents involving all aircraft types declined from 81 in 2013 to 73 in 2014. This also compared favourably with the average number of accidents of 86 over the five-year period from 2009 to 2013.

Further, the global jet accident rate, which was measured in hull losses per one-million flights, fell to its lowest rate in history at 0.23, which was the equivalent of one accident for every 4.4-million flights.

A hull loss is an accident in which the aircraft is destroyed or damaged but not repaired.

This was an improvement over 2013 when the global hull loss rate stood at 0.41, equating to an average of one accident for every 2.4-million flights, as well as the five-year average of 0.58 hull loss accidents per million jet flights.

Sub-Saharan African airliners boasted zero jet hull losses in the year under review, an improvement from the five-year rate of 6.83 per million from 2009 to 2013.

“The fact that the region experienced no jet hull loss accidents last year is real progress,” said Tyler.

However, safety continued to be a challenge for Africa, as demonstrated by the poor performance on turboprops, where Africa reported 14.13 hull losses per million flights in 2014 – the worst performance globally for turboprop hull losses – exceeding the region’s five-year rate of 9.62.

Internationally, all regions showed improvement in 2014 in terms of jet hull losses, when compared to 2013, except Europe, which maintained a rate of 0.15 jet hull losses per one-million flights.

The world’s turboprop hull loss rate improved to 2.3 hull losses per million flights in 2014, compared with 2.78 in the five years from 2009 to 2013.