ABSTRACT
The first passenger fatality in an aviation accident occurred on 17 September 1908 when an aircraft piloted by Orville Wright crashed during a demonstration flight for the United States Army. Wright was seriously injured and his passenger, Lt. Thomas Selfridge, died from his injuries (Paris Herald 1908). The world’s first scheduled commercial airline flight took place only a few years later, but flying during the early days of commercial aviation was expensive and often dangerous. One of the first fatal accidents involving a passenger aircraft was that of a Caproni Ca 48 aircraft, which crashed near Verona on 2 August 1919, killing all 14 people on board (Spooner 1919), and accident rates continued to be unacceptably high into the 1930s, with a passenger fatality rate of about one in 50 000 in the United States and as high as one in 10 000 worldwide (Reid 2012).
