The problem with lists of major accidents is they aren't necessarily a predictor of future accidents, and in some cases may be the reverse. An airline suffering a major accident is likely to lead to a significant safety overhaul.
What's needed is a service that tracks near misses or mistakes such as in this post, and their trend over time for each airline. An increase in frequency for a particular airline might well be usefully predictive.
> The problem with lists of major accidents is they aren't necessarily a predictor of future accidents, and in some cases may be the reverse. An airline suffering a major accident is likely to lead to a significant safety overhaul.
This should be a somewhat testable proposition, right? Does time since accident increase or decrease the probability of next accident?
(Practically, plotting the distribution of inter-accident durations and seeing if the tail falls off exponentially, slower, or faster.)
There is no methodology or details or anything. How does number of accidents relate to number of planes operated, or number of flown miles? What constitutes an "accident"? Do terrorist bomb plots count? Do incidents where the airline could not be be blamed count (e.g. MH17)? Is an accident from 30 years ago still counted? Czech Airlines scores quite low, but the last fatal accident was in 1977; so if these older accidents are counted then why is IcelandAir listed with "no accidents" even though they had one in 1978?
And how is "eco-friendly" or "service" measured? Why does AtlasGlobal score quite well on Safety even though it's ranked quite low in here, while SCAT airlines – with the same number of "odds of fatal accident" – does have a very low safety score?
Sorry, but useless website. Actually, worse than useless because it pretends to be informational but it's not as the actual amount of information is minimal beyond "trust me" and even a basic scrutiny of a few minutes shows up all sorts of inconsistencies and oddities.
It's almost as if "how safe is an airline?" is a complex question that requires expertise and analysis instead of a website with a few lines of JavaScript conjured up by some programmer guy...
Yeah I agree this site is not the definitive answer to the question of airline safety with all its nuances. Like you said, in the end it is a work of just one person and it is perhaps more for entertainment value than information content, because you still have to take it with a huge grain of salt if you meant to make any serious decisions based on it.
But it is good enough for an inspiration to start a tongue-in-cheek airline shitlist the person I was replying to mentioned. At least I got a joky vibe from their comment. Perhaps they were super serious in that they were gonna start one right this second?
The safest carriers are those that have just been founded recently, by this logic. Since they have no incident history.
According to this website, Air Asia is supposedly safer than Singapore. And Xiamen Airlines are safer than Cathay? CX and SQ have one of the best safety records, each only suffered a single hull loss, which is very little considering how long they've been operating.
Air Asia is not even a single operation but a bunch of separate airlines using the same brand for marketing purposes. Some of them have much worse safety record than the others (Air Asia Indonesia for example). One would think this also warrants a mention, considering KLM is labeled "Air France-owned" (which is sort of true but much less relevant). Also for consistency shouldn't Transavia then be labeled "Air France-owned" and not "KLM-owned?" Or maybe Air France should be labeled "KLM-owned" to give the more complete story.
In any case, it would be much more useful to know which airlines are government-owned, since this usually breeds regulatory collusion (especially if the regulator and the head of the airline happen to be the same person).
Anyone can put up a list on the Internet but this one is really misleading. If you want a better picture of airline safety comparison (still with many caveats), there's this one:
What's needed is a service that tracks near misses or mistakes such as in this post, and their trend over time for each airline. An increase in frequency for a particular airline might well be usefully predictive.