OhDoctor

Cue the outrage.

Link

xliioper

If you look at their rating tool, you'll see DL gets the same 7 stars as the top 20.

https://www.airlineratings.com/safety-rating-tool/

OhDoctor

To be clear, I understand a ranking of "Safest Airlines" mostly involves sorting out the "bad" (99.9999% "safe") from whatever arbitrary standard is deemed to represent 100% "safe".

Strangely, they include "profitability" as a measure under consideration. So.. safe investment vehicles?

ethernal

Over half of all airlines get 7 stars, so this is faint praise. I assume Delta had a few serious incidents (didn't some turbines catch on fire on the runway this year?) combined with the usual drag because of their fleet age kept them out of the top 20. Of course, the underlying issue is that air travel is now so safe that trying to differentiate between ultra safe and ultra ultra safe is a task bordering on impossible and more likely to be tripped up by statistical chance than anything else.

I do think that airlines like, e.g., Quantas get the advantage of only running 650 flights a day over Delta's 15000. I'm sure that they adjust for flight counts, but statistically if a serious incident only occurs once every 5 million flights, Delta will on average have one a year whereas Quantas may go 15 without. It's a sensitivity issue when your measure is 0 vs 1.

The logic is that airlines that are unprofitable are more likely to be pressured to cut corners on maintenance or other components of safety (training, etc). You can argue against it, but I am sure there is some correlation analysis that has been done that shows that this is at least somewhat predictive of future incidents.

kop84

What was the tie breaker for the 50ish airlines with 7 stars?

Shouldn't it be either number of takeoff and landings or ASM's? Otherwise it seems rather arbitrary

nystateofmind

If an airline is not "profitable" one of the avenues on which they may skimp is maintenance. Take a look at the fatal crashes of Alaska 261, Chalk's Ocean Airways 101, etc.

ethernal

The "safest airline" rank is independent of the 7 stars (other than the fact that I am sure you need 7 stars to be considered). 7 stars is just formulaic (do you have FAA and other endorsements/certifications? has anyone died in the past 10 years? has your fleet been grounded? etc). The "top airline" rank is based on more continuous variables (fleet ages, incidents, etc).