Very bad week: Airline disasters come in a cluster

An Air Algerie Airways plane prepares to land at Houari Boumediene Airport in Algiers July 24, 2014. An Air Algerie flight crashed on Thursday en route from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Algiers with 110 passengers on board, an Algerian aviation official said. [Photo/Agencies]

A screengrab of the homepage of the Ouagadougou airport's Internet site (http://www.aeroport-ouagadougou.com) shows a map displaying AH5017's last contact zone, July 24, 2014. A missing Air Algerie Airbus A320 plane lost contact en route from Burkina Faso to Algiers carrying 110 passengers, almost half of them French citizens, and 6 crew, an Algerian official said on Thursday. [Photo/Agencies]

WASHINGTON - Nearly 300 passengers are killed when their plane is shot out of the sky over eastern Ukraine. Airlines suspend flights to Israel's largest airport after rocket attacks. An airliner crashes during a storm in Taiwan, and yet another disappears in West Africa. Aviation has suffered one of its worst weeks in memory.

Industry analysts and safety experts say they can find no common themes. Nor do they think the events indicate that flying is suddenly becoming less safe.

Less than one in 2 million flights last year ended in an accident in which the plane was damaged beyond repair, according to the International Air Transport Association. That includes accidents involving cargo and charter airlines as well as scheduled passenger flights.

"One of the things that makes me feel better when we look at these events is that if they all were the same type event or same root cause then you would say there's a systemic problem here, but each event is unique in its own way," said Jon Beatty, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, an airline industry-supported nonprofit in the US that promotes global aviation safety.

But Beatty said he also finds the disaster cluster "a cold reminder" that airline accidents are likely to increase because the industry is growing, especially in developing countries. The more flights there are, the more potential for accidents, he said.