There were no passenger jet crashes, separate reports by Dutch consultancy To70 and The Aviation Safety Network found, BBC News reports, despite more flights being made than ever before.
But To70 warned that despite high safety levels on passenger planes (over a certain size), the "extraordinarily" low accident rate must be seen as "good fortune".
There were however 10 fatal cargo aircraft accidents, resulting in 79 deaths last year.
The organisation based its figures on incidents involving civil aircraft certified to carry at least 14 people.
The most serious accident of 2017 came in January when a Turkish cargo plane crashed into a village in Kyrgyzstan killing all four crew and 35 people on the ground.
Neither report counted military or helicopter accidents.
Aviation deaths have been steadily falling for the last two decades. In 2005, there were more than 1,000 deaths on-board commercial passenger flights worldwide, the Aviation Safety Network said.
The last fatal passenger jet airliner accident took place in November 2016 in Colombia, and the last commercial passenger aircraft crash to kill more than 100 people occurred in Egypt a year earlier.
