Aviation risk analysis – Etihad is the world’s safest airline – News

• The Arabian airline Ethihad is the safest airline in the world.
• This is the result of the annual safety evaluation by the German flight safety agency Jacdec.
• The Arab airline Emirates follows in second place, followed by the Dutch KLM, Jetblue from the USA and the British airline Easyjet.

The parent company of Swiss, Lufthansa, occupies 14th place in the global ranking of the 25 companies with the highest traffic performance. Etihad edged Emirates to second place. Both companies have comparatively young fleets, according to the report published in the February issue of the aviation magazine Aero International.

After the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Russian airline Aeroflot was significantly devalued and now only ranks 25th. Safety-related reasons for the devaluation included the illegal admission of Western leasing jets to the Russian register and the interruption in the supply of spare parts in Russia due to economic sanctions.

Accident history, among other things, is decisive

Of the Jacdec Risk Index is based on each airline’s accident history over the past 30 years, the country-specific environment in which it operates, and airline-specific risk factors. Theoretically, an index value of 100 is achievable, but even the best companies fall short. The number of passenger kilometers flown by the airlines is important: the more of these an airline covers without an accident, the lower the risk and therefore safer it is in this ranking.

Among the busiest operators in Europe, Finnair achieved the highest index value, followed by KLM and Transavia. The Lufthansa subsidiary Eurowings took eighth place and the holiday airline Condor twelfth. The Lufthansa core company was 15th in this traffic region.

Basically, in the year of the restart after the Corona lull in civil air traffic, an extremely high level of safety was achieved again, says study leader Jan-Arwed Richter. This means that individual events have a particularly strong influence on the statistics.

Worst accident of the year

The crash of a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 on March 21 near the southern Chinese city of Wuzhou is cited as the deadliest accident of the year. All 132 people on board died. The accident was presumably due to the suicide of the co-pilot. Jacdec relies on insider information, while the Chinese investigative authorities have so far kept a low profile.

Overall, Jacdec registered 19 flight accidents resulting in death last year, in which a total of 233 people lost their lives. That was 60 more deaths than in 2021, when significantly less was flown. The average for the past ten years is 372 deaths.