Hamburg - Last year's death toll in passenger aviation crashes fell to 598 worldwide, well below the average of the past decades, German analysts said Thursday in Hamburg.

The annual analysis by the private Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre (JACDEC) was published in the German aviation magazine Aero International. It said most of the crashes in 2008 were evidently caused by human error.

Indicating 2008 was a safer year, the analysts said the toll was 153 lower than in 2007, and 259 lower than the 10-year average of death tolls.

JACDEC calculated that airlines carried 2.5 billion passengers last year, so the likelihood for a person on any one flight of being killed in an air crash was just 0.000024 per cent. (dpa)