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Tragic week in air travel belies statistical safety of flying

An Emergencies Ministry member walks at a site of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 plane crash near the settlement of Grabovo in the Donetsk region, July 17, 2014. REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev

It has been a bad week for the aviation industry, with at least three major crashes in recent days – one shot down by rebels in Ukraine and two others crashed for unknown reasons in Mali and Taiwan.

With these incidents falling so closely onto the heels of the mysterious disappearance of and massive search for a China-bound flight in March, those considering taking a flight any time soon could be forgiven for thinking that air travel is becoming more dangerous.

But those people would be wrong, it seems, with experts and statistics suggesting it flying has never been safer.

Crashes and disasters in the airline industry have been top of mind for much of this year, after a weeks-long search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared without a trace over the South China Sea in March, and more recently for the abjectly raw destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, shot down over Ukraine.

An Air Algeria flight carrying 110 passengers crashed in Mali on Thursday, and a TransAsia flight crash killed 48 others in Taiwan.

[ Related: Missing Air Algerie plane from Burkina Faso has crashed: Algerian official ]

But in spite of these high profile incidents, airline travel is considered as safe as or safer than any time in the industry's past. And the statistics back it up.

According to the website Plane Crash Info, the number of accidents per year is a fraction of what is was in the late 1960s, when the aviation industry hit heights of 35 significant crashes per year.

Last year, there were reportedly five plane crashes involving 18 or more passengers, and only two involving planes carrying 100 passengers or more.

Regardless, the problems of the last week are sure to stick out. But as aviation expert William McGee told Yahoo News on Thursday, there's nothing to suggest it was anything more than a statistical anomaly.

“I don’t see any threads, quite frankly, other than they happened within days of each other,” McGee told Yahoo News. “It’s still too early to talk about how 2014 is going to shape up against other years.”

According to an International Air Transport Association report, the number of fatalities have decreased in recent years. Last year, there were 16 fatal air accidents that claimed the lives of 210 people. In 2010, there were 23 fatal accidents killing 786.

But despite the repeated ascertain that air travel is safe, there is some indication that some travel is safer than others.

Every year, the Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre releases a list of the safety records of the 60 major international airlines. Their scoring system comes from calculation involving history of accidents, serious incidents and relevant safety benchmarks.

This year, Air New Zealand was found to be the safest airline with which to travel, with Cathay Pacific Airways placing second.

Canada's two major airlines both fared well. Air Canada ranked ninth internationally, while Westjet placed 22nd.

The lowest ranked airline was found to be Indonesia's Lion Air, followed by Vietnam Airlines and and China Airlines respectively.

According to the site Plane Crash Info, the odds of being killed in a fatal crash while travelling on one of the world's 78 major airlines is one in 4.7 million.

The odds of being in a crash while travelling with an airline considered to be among the top 39 accident rates is much better: one in 10 million.

On the flip side of that, the odds of being killed in a crash while flying with one of the bottom 39 drop to one in two million. In all cases, death from air travel is unlikely. Still, some odds sit in the stomach better than others.