How safe is your airline?

[Kan Win]

When a Qantas A380 suffered what could have been catastrophic damage over Indonesia three years ago, travellers despaired. How could the safest airline in the world, by their estimation, have threatened so many lives?

They were no less bamboozled when Air France, one of the most prestigious full-service carriers, killed 228 over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 in what appears to have been an entirely preventable miscalculation.

The Persian Gulf’s three boom carriers Qatar Airways, Emirates and Etihad, are the height of travel fashion and carry tens of thousands of Australians every week, but they operate from very different government jurisdictions. So how do we know whether we should trust them with our lives?

Please read more from "The Age" AU.

http://www.theage.com.au/travel/blogs/travellers-check/how-safe-is-your-airline-20130617-2oda3.html

Win

[impulse]

To answer the title: Safer than the car ride to and from the airport.

[daveyravey]

If you think qantas are the safest you are sadly mistaken. It all started to go wrong when they subbed out their maintenance to asian countries like Phillippines.

[baboon]

To answer the title: Safer than the car ride to and from the airport.

Exactly. Even the so called 'dangerous' carriers are pretty safe.

[Tomtomtom69]

I agree with much of the content of this article. I think it was last year there was another article about airline safety that kept cropping up on Australia's ninemsn.com.au. The article also rated airlines in the categories of "best" and "worst" for safety. THAI Airways was ranked only 53rd safest and thus placed in the 10 "worst" airlines category. I have no idea where that came from. The airline hasn't had any fatal accidents since 1998 and only a couple of incidents since then - an engine fire on a 747? flying from Bangkok to Chiang Mai was taken care of quickly when the pilot made a quick decision to return to BKK, in 2005 an inflight cracked window forced a THAI 747-400 bound for Munich to make an emergency landing in Kolkata. I'm not going to count the 2001? bombing of a parked domestic plane which was targeted at former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra as terrorism on the ground is not an airline issue but an airport security issue and thus doesn't undermine the safety record of THAI Airways. Unsurprisingly, Air France also rated in the "worst" category for safety but at rank 51 if I recall correctly, to rate it slightly higher than THAI is shameful. Air France has had numerous incidents since 2000, including the Concorde crash in 2001, the 2005 runway overrun in Toronto and of course the now infamous 2009 flight 447 crash over the Atlantic. So at least 3 major accidents, 2 of which were complete hull losses and no survivors.

[User3]

I take those commercial/sponsored sites with a grain of salt. Too much subjectivity for me.

However, I do have a aircraft related question...maybe not travel, but.

The attached pdf file is a list of all air accidents in Thailand starting from 1929. Round about 1942 there were 3 Curtiss P-40's lost (gunfire) and the operator is listed as 'AVG'. Anyone got any idea who AVG was??

Cheers

PS, there are approx 1,000 accidents listed in this database.

Air_Accidents.pdf