(The former Virgin America is now part of Alaska Airlines.A Florida woman is suing Dallas-based Southwest Airlines after a wheelchair accident while boarding left her paralyzed. The different Virgin airlines have something in common besides the brand: a sterling safety history. Virgin Atlantic / Virgin Australia / Virgin America It has been around since 1992, and unlike many other post-USSR airlines, it has never had a fatality since the 1991 collapse of the USSR. While the old Swissair was undone by the effects of an ill-advised expansion strategy and the aftermath of a major disaster, the crash of Flight 111 in 1998, its successor since 2002 has a perfect record when it comes to safetyĪlthough the former Soviet Union does not have a precisely stellar record when it comes to safety, UIA shines in this matter. It has been flying since 1984, and it has grown exponentially into the largest airline in Europe by passengers flown and the biggest operator in the world of the Boeing 737. Say what you may about Ryanair's service, but its safety record is as good as it gets. And Spirit may be criticized for its nickel-and-diming of passengers, but not for safety: In 26 years of flying, it has matched its low-fare peers' zero-crashes record.Ī Qantas A380 like this one suffered an engine explosion in 2010, but returned safely to Singapore (Image by Shutterstock) Frontier is a quarter of a century old, and has gone at times through several financial turbulence, yet its safety record has been spotless. Allegiant has been in the news recently when a 60 Minutes investigation alleged unsafe practices at the airline, and unhappy pilots fly a fleet with a relatively high average age, but it's had zero fatalities in 20 years of flying. It may be unfair to lump all three of these airlines together, but they do have one factor in common: They never lost a passenger. The US ultra-low-fare carriers: Allegiant, Frontier, Spirit
If there is any that, in our rush, we have left out, please, let us know!
It's nothing personal!), that have been operating commercial regular flights under its own brand name for, at least, a decade. Other useful resources with plenty of data and statistics on airline safety are ASN and PlaneCrashInfo.įor the sake of simplicity we have focused on those carrying at least a million passengers a year (apologies if you happen to run a small regional commuter airline somewhere with a spotless safety record since 1927. Those interested in a more multi-dimensional approach may find answers in lists such as those compiled by the Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Center (Jacdec) or AirlineRatings, which rate airline safety according to formula that takes into consideration a whole range of factors such as the number of passengers carried per year, the number of movements, the number of years in operation or even the geographical environment airlines fly into. Nevertheless, and, for the sake of consistency we have stuck to our binary methodology. This can be seen as a tad unfair to airlines with histories spanning decades compared to relatively recent arrivals.
Some airlines that are, sadly, not on this list have great safety records and procedures, but had the misfortune to experience a fatall incident at some point in a distant past. Aviation safety is a lot more complex than counting fatal accidents, and this list should not be taken at face value as an indicator that an airline is safer than another. To be honest, this methodology is a little crude, and can be a bit unfair. We have looked a pretty simple binary choice - has the airline ever experienced a fatal incident in its history? We set out to find out who these airlines are. (Southwest had an accident in 2005 in which a person on the ground, but not a passenger, was killed.) And that also means the small group of airlines in the world that can lay claim to this ultimate indicator of safety just got smaller. It's also the end of a 50-year perfect record for Southwest, which had never lost a passenger before. The Southwest flight 1380 accident on Monday and the confirmation that one of the passengers had died of her injuries after an engine exploded mid-flight have ended a nine-year record streak of zero fatalities in US commercial aviation.
0 kommentar(er)
