Lufthansa only in the middle: the safest airlines come from the Gulf

Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Lufthansa only in the middle
The safest airlines come from the Gulf

The safest airline in the world does not come from Germany, Japan or America, but from Dubai. Lufthansa, on the other hand, only makes it back into midfield and is clearly behind another German airline.

According to experts, the airline Emirates from Dubai defended its title as the safest airline in the world in the exceptional year 2020 – Lufthansa, on the other hand, only made it into midfield. With a risk index of 94.75 percent, Emirates is once again just ahead of another golf airline, Etihad Airways (94.73 percent). This was the result of the annual safety ranking of the Hamburg flight safety office Jacdec in cooperation with the aviation magazine "Aero International". The best value that can only be achieved theoretically is 100 percent.

The Spanish Air Europa (4th place) and Finnair (5) also defended their positions, ahead of the two Dutch companies KLM (6) and Transavia (7). The low-cost airline Scoot from Singapore, whose parent company Singapore Airlines only came in 21st, surprisingly came in third.

In the case of airlines from German-speaking countries, it was again only enough for a place in the midfield. As the safest German airline, Eurowings ranks 28th with a risk index of 90.10 percent. Lufthansa, which slipped from 21st to 56th in 2019 after a crash on the ground with a total loss, is now in 57th place Frankfurt airport staff steered a mobile passenger staircase into the rear of a Lufthansa jet – the aircraft was irreparably damaged. Since there were passengers on board during the accident, the incident put a strain on Jacdec's balance sheet.

Past 30 years are included

In view of the greatly reduced flight activities, however, this time the table is only of limited informative value, as the passenger kilometers flown by the airlines are an important parameter in the evaluation. The more an airline can travel without an accident, the safer it is in this ranking. However, since there were massive slumps in flight activities due to corona in 2020, old airline accidents were more significant this time.

The Jacdec rating includes the 100 airlines with the world's highest traffic performance. The results are shown as a percentage, with the values ​​oriented from the maximum value of 100 percent downwards. The assessment is based on the airline's accident history over the past 30 years, the country-specific environment in which it operates and the airlines' specific risk factors.

In 2020 there were at least three major accidents: the shooting down of a Ukrainian Boeing 737-800 in Iran with 176 deaths, the crash of a Pakistani Airbus A320 in Karachi with 97 deaths and the landing accident of a Boeing in India in which 20 people died.