Aircraft crashes due to inadvertent gunfire have become the leading cause of death in commercial aviation in recent years, signaling a new trend at odds with an otherwise improving safety picture, while at the same time the incidents also demonstrate the rise of global conflicts.

Wednesday’s crash of the Azerbaijan Airlines jet in Kazakhstan, if officially confirmed to have been hit by Russian fire, would be the third deadliest downing of a passenger jet linked to armed conflict since 2014, according to the Aviation Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network. a global database of accidents and incidents, the Wall Street Journal reports. Now, more than 500 people will have been killed by these attacks during this period.

Preliminary results of Azerbaijan’s investigation into the crash indicate that the plane was hit by a Russian anti-aircraft missile or its fragments.

“The incident is now being added to the list of downs,” said Andy Blackwell, aviation risk adviser to ISARR and former head of safety at Virgin Atlantic. “We have the conventional threats, from terrorists and terrorist groups, but now we also have this random risk.”

The downing of commercial aircraft is now the number one cause of death in aviation accidents during these years, according to ASN data.

This is a dramatic change as in the previous 10 years, there have been no fatal crashes on scheduled commercial passenger flights, ASN figures show.

The trend underscores the difficulty—if not the impossibility—of protecting civil aviation in war zones, even for strict aviation regulators, because of the practices of war. At the turn of the last century, similar dangers plagued sea travel, when belligerents targeted shipping.

The increasing number of deaths in civil aviation accidents due to wars reflects the also increasing number of armed conflicts internationally and the prevalence of powerful anti-aircraft weapons. If the plane crash in Kazakhstan is proven to be the result of a missile attack, it would mean that the three deadliest aviation tragedies of the past decade were caused by inadvertent strikes of passenger planes flying near conflict zones by forces that had wanted to shoot down enemy military aircraft.

Two of those incidents were linked to Russia: Wednesday’s crash of an Embraer E190 with 67 people on board, killing 38, and the 2014 crash of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flying over a conflict zone in Ukraine and all 298 on board were killed.

Another downing incident was the crash of a Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 that killed all 176 on board. The aircraft came under fire from Iranian forces as it took off from Tehran. Iran’s missile defense systems were on alert for a possible US strike at the time.

The series of unintended mass deaths is a chilling reminder that in war situations, distinguishing enemy from friend, or simply assessing threats, often requires split-second decisions based on incomplete information. These judgments are often made by frightened and agitated soldiers. During combat, friendly fire attacks – where forces accidentally hit comrades – are a constant risk.

In the latest such incident, US forces aboard the USS Gettysburg in the Red Sea on December 22 accidentally shot down a US Navy F/A-18 fighter jet from the same carrier group. Both crew members ejected safely. The incident is under investigation.

Aviation safety experts, pilots and families of plane crash victims have warned of the danger of flying both since the war in Ukraine and amid the escalating conflict in the Middle East, which has seen long-range missiles fired onto busy airstrips.

In October, for example, Iran’s unannounced strike against Israel grounded hundreds of commercial airliners traveling through the airstrip that separates the two states. Passengers in the cabins captured footage of the missile launch, while pilots received warnings of nearby launches via radios and air traffic control frequencies.

Data from Flightradar24 showed that several Iranian aircraft took off in the minutes before that attack, indicating that even local airlines were not informed before the strike. Countries in the region began issuing airspace closure announcements about half an hour after the attack began.

The Israeli military usually coordinates strikes with air traffic controllers, but has regularly targeted locations at or near airports in recent months, including a building separating two runways at Beirut airport last month. On Thursday, Israel struck Houthi targets at Sana’a International Airport in Yemen. On Friday, Yemeni rebels fired a missile at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, which was intercepted by Israel.

The phenomenon is not new. In 1983, a Soviet fighter jet shot down a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 that had entered Soviet airspace during a tense period of the Cold War, killing all 269 on board. Soviet authorities believed it was a military flight.

Five years later, during the Iran-Iraq War, the crew of the USS Vincennes, a US Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus A300, killing all 290 people on board.

However, in recent years, disasters have decreased and civil aviation safety has improved overall and substantially. Airplanes are among the safest means of travel today.

After the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by Russia in 2014, the only other single cause directly linked to hundreds of deaths in commercial aviation crashes was the faulty design of Boeing’s 737 MAX jets. The two crashes in five months that claimed a total of 346 lives were caused by problems that grounded the company’s aircraft fleet in 2019. Boeing and regulators say those issues have now been fixed.

Commercial aviation has become much safer precisely because chronic hazards have been repeatedly identified and addressed. The industry has widely adopted an approach to reporting problems and investigating accidents so that systemic risks can be addressed, without fear of retaliation, rather than being ignored or hidden.

Deaths on scheduled commercial flights last year fell to 17 people per billion passengers flown, down from 50 people per billion passengers in 2022, according to the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization. The accident rate, for example, fell to 1.87 per million departures last year from 2.05 per million departures in 2022.

However, the increase in major conflicts has heightened the concerns of aviation security experts about how governments can successfully manage the security of civilian aircraft alongside pressure to keep secret the timing and strategy of military strikes and the economic impact of airspace closure.

Similarly, airlines must balance safety risk assessments against the financial burden of canceling flights or rerouting their aircraft to safer, but longer, flight paths.