Airline safety is one of those things you hope you’ll never have to worry about when you travel.
But even the most nervous of fliers should take heart when flying Australia’s flag carrier, Qantas as it has just been rated the safest airline in the world for what is effectively the seventh year in a row.
The safety table was created by AirlineRatings.com, an airline safety and product review website, which monitors 405 airlines around the world and produces an annual list of the ones deemed safest.
The world’s safest airlines for 2020
Qantas held the title of the world’s safest airline from 2014 to 2017. In 2018, AirlineRatings could find no clear “winner” so awarded the accolade jointly to the top 20 airlines, listing them alphabetically. But this year, Qantas has returned to the top.
The rankings take into account factors including audits from aviation bodies and governments, crash and serious incident records, fleet age, financial position, pilot training and culture.
They did not look at minor incidents, as all airlines have incidents every day.
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 pure-jet era. Air New Zealand comes in second, while Taiwan’s EVA Air is third. Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways — a new entry — ranks fourth. The rest of the top 10 is made up of Qatar Airways, Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Alaska Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Virgin Australia. Ranked 10-20 are Hawaiian Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, TAP Air Portugal, SAS, Royal Jordanian, Swiss, Finnair, Lufthansa, Aer Lingus and KLM.
Notable exceptions from the list are British Airways, ANA, American Airlines and United, all of which made the top 20 last year. Japan Airlines and Delta also failed to make the cut — both have been on previous lists.
The website has also produced a list of the world’s safest budget airlines, although these are ranked equally, and so listed alphabetically. They are: Air Arabia, Flybe, Frontier, HK Express, IndiGo, Jetblue, Volaris, Vueling, Westjet and Wizz Air.
Source – CNN.
