European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) member state (MS) operators of commercial air transport (CAT) airplanes of more than 5,700 kg (12,566 lb) maximum takeoff mass suffered one fatal accident in 2015, 24 nonfatal accidents and 58 serious incidents, according to EASA’s Annual Safety Review 2016, released July 1. The one fatal accident was the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 on March 24, 2015, in which 150 passengers and crew were killed. The crash is not universally included in aviation industry accident calculations because investigators determined that the crash was due to “the deliberate and planned action of the copilot, who decided to commit suicide while alone in the cockpit” (ASW, 5/16, p. 12). The International Air Transport Association, for example, did not include the Germanwings crash in its 2015 accident statistics (ASW, 3/16, p. 47).
