QANTAS Airways has been ranked as the world’s safest airline for 2020 – but British Airways, American Airlines and United have failed to crack the top 20.
The Airline safety and product rating review website, AirlineRatings.com, conducted its findings by monitoring 405 airlines on crash and serious incident record, government audits, and industry-leading safety initiatives.
Other factors taken into consideration were fleet age, audits from aviation’s governing and industry bodies, and profitability.
Geoffrey Thomas, the editor-in-chief of AirlineRatings, explained: “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.”
The Australian Airline Qantas also ranked number one from 2014 to 2017.
Geoffrey continued: “But Qantas is not alone. Long established airlines such as Hawaiian and Finnair have perfect records in the jet era.”
Following Qantas, in numerical order, the top 10 safest airlines are: Air New Zealand, EVA Air, Etihad, Qatar Airways, Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Alaska Airlines, Cathay Pacific Airways, Virgin Australia, and Hawaiian Airlines.
The other 10 that follow are: Virgin Atlantic Airlines, TAP Portugal, SAS, Royal Jordanian, Swiss, Finnair, Lufthansa, Aer Lingus, and KLM.
Only major incidents were used in determining the airline ratings.
According to Geoffrey, British Airways ranked poorly because of a “combination of fleet age and the number of incidents… which were not life-threatening but there were a lot of them compared to other airlines of similar size.”
Earlier this year, both United Airlines and American Airlines, had pilots arrested over suspicion of alcohol intoxication.
British Airways, United Airlines and American Airlines were all ranked within the top 20 safest airlines in 2018.
In regards to the 10 safest low cost airlines, which was also announced Thursday, Geoffrey stated: “All airlines have incidents every day, and many are aircraft or engine manufacture issues, not airline operational problems.
“And it is the way the flight crew handles incidents that determines a good airline from an unsafe one. So just lumping all incidents together is very misleading.”
The 10 safest low cost airlines in 2020 were listed in alphabetical order as Air Arabia, Flybe, Frontier, HK Express, IndiGo, Jetblue, Volaris, Vueling, Westjet, and Wizz.
