Kelly Robertson
AirlineRatings.com has announced its top twenty safest airlines and top ten safest low-cost airlines for 2017 from the 425 it monitors.
Australia’s Qantas tops the list with its fatality free record in the jet era, which is an extraordinary record. The rest of the top 20 list includes, in alphabetical order: Air New Zealand, Alaska Airlines, All Nippon Airways, British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways, Delta Air Lines, Etihad Airways, EVA Air, Finnair, Hawaiian Airlines, Japan Airlines, KLM, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airline System, Singapore Airlines, Swiss, United Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Australia.
A number of factors has been consulted to make the list, including audits from aviation’s governing bodies and lead associations, government audits, airline’s crash and serious incident record, profitability and fleet age.
Also identified were top ten safest low-cost airlines — in alphabetical order they are: Aer Lingus, Flybe, HK Express, Jetblue, Jetstar Australia, Jetstar Asia, Thomas Cook, Virgin America, Vueling and Westjet.
All of these low-cost carriers have passed the stringent International Air Transport Association Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) which has over 1,000 audit items and have excellent safety records.
Of the 425 airlines surveyed, 148 have the top seven-star safety ranking but almost 50 have just three stars or less. There are 14 airlines with only one star and these airlines are from Afghanistan, Indonesia, Nepal and Surinam.
Despite some high-profile accidents in 2016, the number of crashes has shown a steady and persistent decline over the past two decades. In fact, stats from the Aviation Safety Network show that 2016 was the second safest year on record to take a flight. Eleven of the accidents and 288 deaths involved passenger flights translating to one fatal passenger flight per 3.2 million flights.
This means aviation is still by far the safest way to travel and provides a context for the widespread media coverage of high-profile crashes such as the LaMia tragedy in Colombia involving a Brazillian football team.
