Having said that, I always thought that my national airline was the safest, but it appears that that illusion is no longer viable. According to Slate, it is number 13 (for those who believe in unlucky numbers, this worsens the whole issue, doesn't it?).
So was QANTAS ever the safest airline?
No, and it was never true. Qantas airplanes have crashed multiple times, with the most recent fatal accident occurring in 1951. Still, it's never had a crash since the commercial adoption of the jet engine, and a recent report by the Switzerland-based Air Transport Rating Agency named Qantas the 13th safest airline. The 10 safest airlines in 2011 were Air France-KLM, American Airlines, British Airways, Continental Airlines, Delta Airlines, Japan Airlines, Lufthansa, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, and US Airways. (The list is in alphabetical order, because the organization did not sort the top 10 by safety.) While several of those airlines have had fatal accidents more recently than Qantas, crashes were only one of 15 factors used in the rankings. The group also considered pilot-training facilities, maintenance capacity, age of fleet, number of employees, and financial health, among others. Nervous flyers have plenty of options today if they want to fly on an airline that has never crashed. Domestically, Jet Blue would be the best-known choice. (Southwest also qualifies, sort of. In a 2007 incident, one of their planes killed someone on the ground, though no passengers died. )
This shows that by trying to cost cost, QANTAS has also lost their safety standard, by shifting their airplane service over to Malaysia, and not keeping it here in Australia, where the safety standards are clearly higher.
Well, at least, we are still one of the most safest airlines in the world. If you are flying in third world country airlines, I really pray that you survive:
This isn’t to say that all airlines are equally safe. There are several airlines that the FAA has refused to certify, and the EU bans airlines (PDF) that don’t meet its safety standards from flying over Europe. All of the blacklisted carriers are from the developing world, and the EU has the stats to justify that decision. According to a 2010 study by Barnett, airlines in the developing world suffer fatalities at more than 17 times the rate of first-world carriers.
Hope you wil take the proper airline choices next time you travel.
Luis A. Jovel
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