An examination of world’s airlines has found that Emirates Airline and Etihad Airways are among the safest carriers, ranking 4th and 5th, while Qatar Airways
trails far behind at 22nd.
The 2012 results were released by the Germany-based Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre (JACDEC), which looked at airlines’ number of hull losses (whether an aircraft has been destroyed or damaged beyond economical repair), serious incidents and other factors to compute the rankings. The researchers also took into account the international safety benchmarks such as the IOSA Audit and the USOAP country factor. All calculation data ends after a period of 30 years. Fatalities are only counted when they were on board a passenger flight.
JACDEC has not released the full details of its report, but the rankings for 60 airlines only, and some analysts have said that the rankings don’t add up.
Among the worst ranked for safety are the Turkish Airlines (54th), as well as Saudi Arabian Airlines (55th) and Air India (58th), with Taiwan-based China Airlines occupying the 60th place.
