This was published 5 years ago
World's safest, and least safe, airlines named in 2019 rankings
By Traveller
Qantas has been named the world's safest airline in new rankings.
Qantas has been named the world's safest airline in the annual rankings from AirlinesRatings.com.
The website, which rates the safety and quality of 405 airlines around the world, put Qantas at number one in its top 20 safest airlines.
"It is extraordinary that Qantas has been the lead airline in virtually every major operational safety advancement over the past 60 years and has not had a fatality in the jet era," said Mr Geoffrey Thomas, AirlineRatings' editor-in-chief.
The website uses numerous factors to determine its ratings, including audits from aviation's governing bodies and lead associations; government audits; airline's crash and serious incident record, fleet age and profitability.
AirlineRatings' top 20 list does not put the airlines in any particular order, but ranks them all as the world's safest with each getting a perfect seven out of seven score.
This year's top 20 list in alphabetical order is:
- Air New Zealand
- Alaska Airlines
- All Nippon Airways
- American Airlines
- Austrian Airlines
- British Airways
- Cathay Pacific Airways
- Emirates
- EVA Air
- Finnair
- Hawaiian Airlines
- KLM
- Lufthansa
- Qantas
- Qatar Airways
- Scandinavian Airline System (SAS)
- Singapore Airlines
- Swiss
- United Airlines
- Virgin group of airlines (Atlantic and Australia).
The website also named the five lowest ranked airlines for safety. These were:
- Ariana Afghan Airlines (Afghanistan)
- Blue Wing Airlines (Suriname)
- Kam Air (Afghanistan)
- Tara Air (Nepal)
- Trigana Air Service (Indonesia)
The fatality rate on passenger jet aircraft worldwide jumped in 2018 after airlines recorded zero accident deaths on passenger jets in the prior year, according to a Dutch consulting firm and an aviation safety group.
Dutch aviation consulting firm To70 and the Aviation Safety Network both reported on Tuesday there were more than 500 deaths stemming from passenger airline crashes in 2018, but emphasised that fatal crashes remain rare.
To70 estimated that the fatal accident rate for large commercial passenger flights at 0.36 per million flights, or one fatal accident for every 3 million flights.
That is up from 2017's 0.06 per million flight rate and above the most recent five-year average of 0.24 per million flights. There were 13 deaths in 2017 in two fatal crashes worldwide, but both were on regional turboprop aircraft.
Over the last two decades, aviation deaths around the world have been falling. As recently as 2005, there were 1,015 deaths aboard commercial passenger flights worldwide, the Aviation Safety Network said.
Despite the increase, 2018 was still the third safest year ever in terms of the number of fatal accidents and the ninth safest measured by deaths, the Aviation Safety Network said.
"If the accident rate had remained the same as ten years ago, there would have been 39 fatal accidents last year," Aviation Safety Network's chief executive, Harro Ranter, said in a statement. "This shows the enormous progress in terms of safety in the past two decades."
On Oct. 29, a Lion Air-operated Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed into the Java Sea after takeoff from Jakarta, killing 189.
In May, a Cubana flight of a Boeing 737-201 crashed just outside Havana airport, killing 112 people. In March, 51 of 71 on board died after a US-Bangla Airlines plane crashed on landing at Nepal's international airport.
In February, a plane operated by Saratov Airlines crashed in Russia after taking off from Stepanovskoye, killing all 71 people aboard, while the same month an Aseman Airlines flight crashed into a mountain in Iran, killing 66 people onboard.
The United States suffered its first accident death involving a U.S. airline since 2009 in April, when a fan blade on a Southwest Airlines Co Boeing 737's jet engine broke apart in flight, shattering a window and nearly sucking a woman out of the plane.
with Reuters
See also: World's best airline for 2018 named as Virgin's ranking plummets
See also: Airline review: 'World's best economy class' for 2018 put to the test
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