In Brief:Air crash deaths up 25%

Last year 1,385 people were killed in commercial airline accidents worldwide, an increase of 25 per cent on 1993, according to Flight International magazine's annual survey.

While there were only seven fatal accidents on scheduled passenger flights in 1994, there were two each involving Chinese carriers or those from former Soviet Union countries, which over the past few years have proved relatively dangerous. Two crashes involved American US Air, which is partly owned by British Airways. The seventh accident involved a Turkish aircraft.