My impression is this year they have been more accidents involving larger types with multiple fatalities . These tend to grab the headlines . The NTSB site is down this morning .
First 6 months of 2009 , 19 accidents involving fatalties , 72 killed
same period 2008 , 22 accidents 77 killed.
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/query.asp#query_start US figures include Accident in Russia and the Cougar accident plus a few other non US ( database has gone down for a while ),