Te Marutau — Ngā tatauranga ā-tau Safety — Annual statistics

The bulk of critical and major aviation accidents involve small aeroplanes, helicopters, sport aircraft, hang gliders, parachutes, and agricultural aircraft.¹

[1] Civil Aviation Authority, Aviation Safety Report, 1 July 2017 to 30 June 2018, p. 30. 

caa.govt.nz/assets/legacy/Safety_Reports/2018-1-aviation-update.pdf 

While subject to a good deal of fluctuation from year to year, aviation fatalities have been on a general downward trend for the last 2 decades.

Annually, half of reported serious and minor injuries come from 'private operations — sports aircraft’ accidents, which include aeroplanes, amateur built aeroplanes, amateur built gliders, amateur built helicopters, balloons, gliders, gyroplanes, helicopters, microlights Class 1 and  Class 2, and power gliders).

Fatal aviation accidents remain relatively rare events.

While the number of aviation accidents resulting in death or injury has fluctuated somewhat from year to year, they have remained relatively rare events.

Most incidents in recent times have been largely of a minor nature — including unauthorised people going through unattended security checkpoints, minor incidents on board aircraft and passenger luggage breaches.

Social cost is a way of measuring safety performance by accounting for the number and severity of casualties, and aircraft damage.

The values used to estimate cost to the nation of fatal, serious and minor injuries are obtained from our annual report, ‘Social Cost of Road Crashes and Injuries’. We have directed our agencies to use social cost to permit comparisons between transport modes.

The current average social cost per fatality is NZD$4.37 million as of June 2018. Estimates of the values of aircraft destroyed or written off are made by the Civil Aviation Authority on the basis of market prices in a number of developed aviation nations.