Saturday, a Dutch consulting firm revealed that in 2020, the number of deaths from major commercial flight accidents increased, with 299 aviation deaths around the world, despite the number of accidents decreasing by over 50 percent.

According to CNBC ARABIA, 40 accidents related to large commercial passenger flights were recorded in 2020, five of them fatal, resulting in 299 deaths, compared to 86 accidents in 2019, eight of them fatal, which killed 257 people.

The firm stated that large commercial aircraft recorded 0.27 fatal accidents per million flights last year, up from 0.18 fatal flights per million flights in 2019.

The decrease in the number of crashes comes amid a sharp decline in the number of flights as a result of the pandemic.

According to FlightRadar24, the number of commercial flights it tracked around the world over the past year fell by 42 percent to 24.4 million.

Over half of the total death toll from 2020 (176 deaths) were from the Ukranian plane which was shot down in Iranian airspace in January.

The second deadliest accident occurred in May, when a Pakistani plane crashed, killing 98.

Airline accident deaths have decreased dramatically over the past two decades. The Aviation Safety Network (ASN) said it recorded 1,015 deaths in commercial aircraft crashes around the world in 2005.

Additionally, over the past five years, the network said it recorded an average of 14 fatal accidents involving passenger and cargo aircrafts during that period, which resulted in 345 deaths annually.

2017 was the safest year in aviation traffic globally, with two small plane crashes that resulted in 13 deaths. There were no fatal accidents in the large passenger aircraft sector.

There have been no incidents of commercial airliner crashes in the United States since February 2009.