Each year billions of passengers from all over the world use the airplane. That number only seems to increase in the future. There are high safety standards such as good training and a certificate for your airline needed before you can fly an airplane. Such standards do not prevent airplanes from getting exposed to an excess of risks. If there are risks, then crashes in general are inevitable disregarding the size of the risk.
And because there is an alternating amount of risk the crashes decrease as well. Because of the alternation in the crashes, some periods are safer to fly in than others. The difference between periods can be negligible, but also great. For example in the year 2017, 19 people died in airplane crashes, but in 2018, 523 people died in crashes.
Why did this happen? The planes in 2017 had been less developed, had older updates and had less experienced crew than the society in 2018, then why did this number of deaths rise at all and why that much in just a year? The high death toll was caused by the high number of accidents, now we know how, but not why. To answer why we must search deeper. The cause of the crashes were mostly humanitarian. It is remarkable that the death toll increased that much— in just a year. The leading causes are that the people are being less and less cautious. Safety depends for a great part on wether you are paying attention or not. This is not only true for aircrafts, but it is also true for about every other thing.
About 21 percent of the deaths caused by traffic accidents on the USA are caused by the driver lacking attention to the road. If you want to drive safe, then giving more attention to the road is more effective than buying another car with one more airbag. I think that people should be more aware of the fact that by giving more attention to safety, they improve safety more than they would by buying a similar, but (slightly) safer product.