Significantly more civil aviation incidents logged in Switzerland

Federal government registers significantly more incidents in civil aviation Keystone-SDA

Switzerland saw around 20% more commercial and recreational aviation safety incidents reported to the Federal Office of Civil Aviation than the previous year.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

There had already been a steady increase in such cases in Switzerland in previous years.

+ SWISS crew member dies in Graz after emergency landing

In total, more than 12,500 incidents were processed in 2024, according to the annual safety statistics published by the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA).

Among other things, 32% more runway incidents, 21% more aircraft damage during ground handling and 40% more GPS malfunctions were recorded. There were also 13% more collisions with wild animals, 8% more loading errors and 20% more near misses of aircraft in the air.

There were also more laser attacks and the same number of conflicts with drones as in the previous year, according to the report. Significantly more incidents involving swearing, excessive drinking or violent passengers were also reported to the FOCA.

Increase since 2019

There was also one fatal accident in commercial aviation. The victim was a 23-year-old Swiss flight attendant who died as a result of an emergency landing of an Airbus A220 on 23 December 2024 in Graz, Austria.

In addition, there were three accidents with a total of six fatalities in recreational flying as well as one dead and one seriously injured helicopter pilot following a collision with a cable.

According to the FOCA, incident reports have been increasing since 2019. In the previous year, there were still around 10,000 such incidents – an increase of around 24% compared to 2022.

The main reasons for the increase are a better reporting culture, the increase in commercial air traffic to pre-Covid-19 pandemic levels and more conflict regions with large-scale interference with GPS signals on aircraft.

Translated from Italian by DeepL/mga

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

Did you find this explanation helpful? Please fill out the short survey below to help us understand your needs.