( CNN ) -- This is starting to sound like a broken record , but once again , 2011 was an incredibly safe year for commercial air travel . In fact , there were only 373 fatalities on 18 scheduled passenger flights worldwide . Considering that there are roughly 10 million flights per year in the U.S. alone , this is a remarkable feat . Looking at the Aviation Safety Network 's database , we see that there were 106 `` occurrences '' of all kinds during the year worldwide . This number includes military and cargo aircraft accidents as well as airplanes on test flights . One of the accidents last year was actually with an illegal crop-dusting operation in Russia . So this is pretty detailed . Including all those various occurrences , 50 in total had fatalities ; many of the rest were things like edging over the end of the runway . But once we narrow that number down again to just scheduled passenger flights , we get 18 . Now , 18 fatal accidents still sounds like a lot . After all , could you imagine hearing about one or two major accidents every month ? Most of these , however , probably never made the news here in America . In the U.S. , not a single passenger was killed in an accident on a scheduled passenger flight the entire year . There was one tiny scheduled flight that crashed in Alaska , killing the pilot , but both passengers survived . A couple of bush flying accidents in Northern Canada claimed three lives as well , but that was it for this immediate part of the world . But wait , were n't there some newsmakers in the U.S. this year ? Sure , you heard about the Southwest 737 that had the fuselage tear open at cruising altitude , but everyone walked away in good shape . ( OK , maybe nerves were rattled . ) The rest of the accidents happened in primarily developing areas . The worst offender over the past year has been Russia , where three accidents killed 56 people . This was in addition to several landing accidents that were not fatal and one major crash of a charter flight that killed an entire professional hockey team . Though this does not make flying in Russia unsafe , it certainly was one of the hotspots that should cause alarm for Russian aviation officials . There were two accidents in Indonesia as well as one in Congo . These were on airlines that have been put on the banned list by the European Union for being unsafe , so many people would n't even consider flying them in the first place . There was an accident on a domestic flight in Iran , one on a tourist flight in Nepal , one on a prop in Papua New Guinea and five on turboprops in Latin America . In Europe , there was only one , a turboprop that crashed in Ireland in bad weather . You 're probably wondering what caused these accidents . As usual , none of these was caused by a single issue , but most of them were operating in challenging weather conditions at the time . In some of the more remote places in the world , they do n't have the same kind of weather detection systems or the conservative procedures that we have here in the U.S. , and that can make a difference in the accident rate . Looking through all this data , one thing is clear . Flying remains an incredibly safe mode of transport . Although there will always be an effort to get to zero accidents , that simply wo n't happen with something as complex as aircraft operations . But each year , more aircraft take to the skies , and the chances of something going wrong continue to drop .
In the US , not a single person was killed in an accident on a passenger flight . Eighteen international passenger flights had 373 fatalities in 2008 . Russia was the worst offender , with three accidents killing 56 people .