NO SOONER did Trigana Air flight 257 crash into the remote mountains of Papua on August 16th than Western aviation experts began taking Indonesia to task over its purportedlyabysmalsafetyrecord. The accident, which claimed 54 lives, was the country’s third air disaster in the past eight months: a military jet went down in June with 122 people on board, and last December an Air Asia plane carrying 162 passengers and crew plunged into the Java Sea. “Which regulator in their sane mind would allow an operator [like Trigana] to continue like that?” one consultant asked on CNN. “That problem should have been seen.” “There are a lot of questions about safety compliance and about their ability to get qualified personnel,” another expert said to ABC News. There’s no doubt that flying in Indonesia is more dangerous than flying in, say, Japan, where commercial carriers have not suffered a crash since 1985. There are also well-founded concerns about the country’s supervision of air travel: Indonesia ranks 151st of 181 countries in implementing the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s safety guidelines. But the singling-out of Indonesia as an extreme outlier does not square with the country’s safety record. After accounting for its degree of economic development and the size of its aviation industry, the country falls right in the middle of the pack.

Overall, airplanes are a remarkably safe means of travel. Even on carriers registered in highly mountainous and desperately poor Nepal, which truly is one of themost dangerous countries in the worldto fly in, just one out of every 60,000 passengers has died in aviation accidents since 2000. But gradations still remain between crashes being rare, extremely rare and unthinkably rare. And just like many other forms of health standards, cutting airborne fatalities to the bare minimum is a rich country’s luxury. Excluding hijackings and external attacks, a mere one in 16m passengers has been killed on the airlines of the world’s 30 wealthiest states and territories during the past 15 years. For carriers of the 30 poorest jurisdictions, the rate was 57 times higher, at one in 283,000 (see chart).

Indonesia has given the press good reason to highlight its air-safety failings: since 2004 its carriers collectively lead the world in accidents that killed at least ten passengers, which are sure to merit media coverage. But it would be highly surprising if a country like Indonesia did not appear near the top of this ignominious leaderboard. First, although it is often grouped with middle-income giants like China and Brazil, Indonesia is extremely underdeveloped: even after tripling during the past decade, its current GDP per head of $3,500 puts it in a class with Congo-Brazzaville and Guatemala. Moreover, the country has a gigantic population of 250m, which depends on airplanes to get around its 17,000 mountainous islands. As a result, Indonesians take a lot of flights—the country’s carriers transported 95m passengers last year, the world’s eighth-highest total—thus increasing the number of opportunities for an unlikely disaster to occur.

After adjusting for these factors, Indonesia’s aviation-safety performance looks entirely unremarkable. Since 2000, one of every 120,000 flights on its commercial airlines has reported an incident—anything from a mechanical hiccup to a crash—and one out of every 1.2m passengers has died in an accident. During the same time period, the 27 other countries within $1,000 of Indonesia’s average GDP per person actually fared somewhat worse, with one incident per 90,000 flights and one death per 515,000 passengers. That group includes many of Indonesia’s neighbours in Oceania, such as the Philippines and Papua New Guinea.

None of this means the country’s authorities should rest easy. After all, with rich-world safety performance, about 500 fewer passengers would have died on Indonesian carriers during the past 15 years. But it does mean that as long as Indonesia’s economy continues to grow at a healthy clip of around 5% a year, it will probably invest some of those gains in more reliable aircraft, more rigorous maintenance and better-trained pilots, causing its accident rate to decline. Critics would be far wiser to turn their fire on Nigeria, which is roughly as wealthy as Indonesia but has a passenger-fatality rate 17 times higher.