Singapore Airlines is the world’s sixth safest carrier, according to a new ranking yesterday by aviation website Airline Ratings.
The 2020 rankings; which are based on indicators including crashes, serious incidents records, profitability and fleet age; put the national airline just a few spots below top-ranked Qantas, the Australian carrier which has gone 60 years without any fatalities.
Airline Ratings, which evaluates 405 airlines for their safety and in-flight product offerings, did not elaborate on Singapore Airlines’ performance. It did, however, point out that all the airlines that made the list stood out for being champions in safety, innovation and launching new aircrafts.
Qantas, for example, not only has a clean record but has also contributed to aviation technology by developing flight data recorder and automatic landings via the Global Navigation Satellite System.
“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,” wrote the website’s chief editor, Geoffrey Thomas. “But Qantas is not alone. Long established airlines such as Hawaiian and Finnair have perfect records in the jet era.”
The website also published a list of the world’s 10 safest low-cost airlines, which all passed safety audits by the International Air Transport Association and have excellent safety records. Singapore’s budget airline Scoot did not make it to the list, nor did any other regional carriers.
“All airlines have incidents every day and many are aircraft manufacture [sic] issues, not airline operational problems,” Thomas added. “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.”
Here’s the site’s list of the world’s safest airlines:
- Qantas
- Air New Zealand
- EVA Air
- Etihad
- Qatar Airways
- Singapore Airlines
- Emirates
- Alaska Airlines
- Cathay Pacific Airways
- Virgin Australia
- Hawaiian Airlines
- Virgin Atlantic Airlines
- TAP Portugal
- SAS
- Royal Jordanian
- Swiss
- Finnair
- Lufthansa
- Aer Lingus
- KLM
And its list of the world’s safest budget airlines, in alphabetical order:
Air Arabia
Flybe
Frontier
HK Express
IndiGo
Jetblue
Volaris
Vueling
Westjet
Wizz
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