Maybe it was a blessing in disguise that more families were not traveling to Russia to adopt last year.

The International Air Transport Association released its annual safety report earlier today, and it showed that Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union had the highest airplane accident rate in the world last year. The association, which goes by the acronym IATA, said that the region had 8.6 Western-built hull losses per million flights, which was 13 times the global average. That far outstripped the accident rate in the next closest region, Africa, which was 4.31 accidents per million flights. Overall, however, last year was aviation's safest year on record, with just 0.65 accidents per million flights for Western-built jets. IATA noted that that is equal to just one accident for every 1.5 million flights, which was a 14% improvement over 2005.

Just last month, I looked at the safety record of Russian aviation and of its many new carriers in particular. And I'm very grateful to John, a site member and a retired pilot, for adding comments about some of the reasons why air safety lags in Russia.

IATA clearly recognizes some of those issues. Its chief executive, Giovanni Bisignani, noted that the organization has made a safety audit it administers a condition of membership. If a carrier wants to remain a member of IATA, it must complete an audit by the end of 2007 and clear up any problems by the end of 2008. (If you want to see whether the carrier you are flying is on the safety audit registry, click here.)

Aeroflot is one of only four Russian or Soviet spinoff carriers on the registry, but the listing notes that all of its flights that use Russian-made aircraft such as the Tupolev-134, Ilyushin-86 and Ilyushin-96 are excluded from its registration. Since those are the aircraft that have been more implicated in crashes, I'm not sure what that means for the quality of its registration. As I noted in my March post, however, Aeroflot has said that it will be pulling all Tu-134s and Tu-154s from its fleet by January of next year. (The other regional carriers in the registry are Aerosvit Airlines, Moldavian Airlines and Ukraine International Airlines.)

IATA also called for greater training to deal with poor weather conditions (weather may have been a factor in the March 17 crash of the UTAir jet in Samara) as well to runway safety. It wants to see a 25% improvement in air safety in 2008. But it certainly would be nice if the improvements in Russian airspace could be sooner.