Accident statistics: which airline is the safest?

Aviation experts from the Hamburg Aircraft Accident Bureau JACDEC have again chosen the golf airline Emirates as the safest airline in the world this year. The world's largest operator of the double-decker A380 airliner - the largest passenger jet ever - retains its top position in a JACDEC evaluation for the aviation magazine "Aero International" (February issue). Even a risky incident shortly before the end of the year when a Boeing 777 took off in Dubai did nothing to change this positive overall rating. With a risk index of 95.05 percent, Emirates is among the 25 largest airlines in the world, ahead of the Dutch KLM (93.31 percent), the US airlines Jetblue Airways (91.61) and Delta Air Lines (91.55) and the British Easyjet (91.28). The theoretically achievable best value is 100 percent,it says in the ranking available from the German Press Agency.

Air Canada (90.9) follows in sixth place, ahead of the US airlines Southwest (90.11) and Spirit Airlines (89.73) as well as Irish Ryanair (89.41) and the Arabian Qatar Airways (89.24 ).

Lufthansa landed in 17th place with an index of 87.9. For the first time, the Hamburg aircraft accident investigators also published regional rankings that compare the largest airlines within their regions.

Instead of a single listing with 100 airlines, there are now four individual lists, arranged according to world regions.

Etihad in front of Emirates

Emirates is slipping regionally behind another golf airline, Etihad Airways. However, it did not appear in the top ranking of the world's 25 largest airlines due to a lack of traffic. In the Europe region, the Dutch KLM (93.31) leads the way, ahead of Finnair (93.16), the Spanish Air Europa (93.12), the Dutch Transavia (92.83) and the British Easyjet (91 , 28) and Norwegian (90.95). Wizzair (Hungary / 89.78), TAP (Portugal / 89.63), Ryanair (Ireland / 89.41) and Rossiya Airlines (Russia / 88.92) follow on the other places. Swissair landed in 11th place (88.34), Lufthansa (87.9) in 15th place.

"The reason for this reorganization was primarily due to the changed proportions, which had shifted in favor of many airlines with strong domestic markets such as China or the USA," explained JACDEC founder Jan-Arwed Richter.

Since there was another slump in the aviation business due to a corona-related collapse in 2021 in view of an only hesitant revival of flight activities, old accidents at the airlines were also more significant this time.

Because they did not achieve sufficient passenger kilometers this year, well-known airlines such as Austrian Airlines, Eurowings and Condor are not among the European top 25.

The experts calculated a risk index of 85.7, 89.71 and 88.54 percent for them.

Coronavirus losses of $ 200 billion

Because the corona pandemic ruined the business of many airlines again - most recently the new Omikron variant paralyzed the hoped-for upswing at the end of 2021. Before their appearance and the new restrictions, the general director of the IATA airline association, Willie Walsh, put the industry losses from the pandemic at a good 200 billion dollars at the beginning of October. For 2021 he expected a loss of 52 billion dollars (44.7 billion euros), for 2022 still red numbers of 12 billion dollars - until the bottom line of the industry is back to profit in 2023. With the drastic collapse in air traffic in 2020, airlines worldwide recorded a combined loss of $ 138 billion.

According to the flight safety organization Eurocontrol, all commercial air traffic in Europe last year reached 56 percent of the volume from the pre-Corona year 2019. For the year 2022, the organization is hoping for a recovery to 70 to 90 percent of the volume of 2019.

The JACDEC assessment is based on the airline's accident history over the past 30 years, the country-specific environment in which it operates and the airlines' specific risk factors.

The passenger kilometers flown by the airlines are an important parameter for the assessment: the more of them an airline covers without an accident, the lower the risk and therefore the safer it is in this ranking.

Only the major airlines are included in the definition.

In view of the strongly reduced flight activities due to the corona, the table is again only of limited informative value this time.