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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
What are the safest airlines? Why is that a dumb question?
Feb 18, 2005 | Appearing below are Ask the Pilot's Quarter-Century Safety Achievers -- a list of airlines that have gone fatality-free over the past 25 years (compiled using data mostly from Airsafe.com). Certain small companies are omitted, though I've chosen to retain national flag carriers where applicable, regardless of size. All qualifying airlines have been in existence since at least 1980:
Air Berlin, Air Jamaica, Air Malta, Air Mauritius, Air Niugini (Papua New Guinea), Air New Zealand, Air Portugal, Air Seychelles, Air Tanzania, Air Zimbabwe, Aer Lingus, All Nippon Airways (one crew member killed by deranged passenger), Austrian Airlines, Bahamasair, Britannia Airways, BWIA West Indies Airways (Trinidad and Tobago), Cathay Pacific, Cayman Airways, Finnair, Ghana Airways, Hawaiian Airlines, Icelandair, Lacsa (Costa Rica), Meridiana (Italy), Monarch Airlines (U.K.), Pluna (Uruguay), Royal Brunei, Royal Jordanian, Southwest Airlines, Syrianair, TACA (El Salvador), Tunis Air, Tyrolean Airways (Austria), Qantas.
Several of the above have perfect records pre-dating 1980. Airsafe's own rankings reach back an additional 10 years. I chose 1980 to best account for the changeover period from older, first-generation jets and prop liners to what most would consider "modern" fleets.
You may or may not be surprised by some of the finishers -- second- or third-world operators not normally associated with safety. Whether the placement of an Air Zimbabwe, to pick one, attests to exemplary levels of oversight and professionalism is arguable, and a mild caveat is due. Air Zimbabwe is a tiny outfit with, presently, four jets (two 737s and two 767s). Compare with American Airlines, with close to 800 ships and thousands of daily departures. Since 1980, American has outcrashed Air Zimbabwe 5-0 (including the Sept. 11 aircraft), but plainly the comparison is unfair.
Nonetheless, any unblemished legacy lasting 25 years is impressive, particularly when the setting is an underdeveloped nation with substandard facilities and infrastructure. On the cultural sensitivity front, it helps debunk the customary wisdom that Western carriers present far and away better odds than everybody else's. And bear in mind that an exemption for even a single incident would expand the preceding list hugely, as would allowances for hijackings, hostile shoot-downs, or crashes involving fully or partly administered subsidiaries. A rundown of those with one fatal mishap since 1980 takes in, just for starters, Royal Air Maroc, Kenya Airways and Mexicana. Even the much maligned Air Afrique, the West African collective that went bust a few years ago, listed but a single death -- a lone passenger murdered by a hijacker -- over a span of more than 30 years.
Airsafe, by the way, credits our old friend U-Land Airlines with having maintained a spotless register during its short-lived career. While they lasted, U-Land's good fortunes stood as a testament either to the skills of its crews or to those of its passengers, depending how literally the airline took its name. Or else they were just lucky. In 2000, Taiwanese authorities preemptively shut U-Land down for various airworthiness violations.
What about safety as an attractive, moneymaking pitch? Why not an airline that trumpets its ways of keeping passengers safe? Why isn't someone trying to be the Volvo of the skies?
As a rule, airlines in America do not use safety as a marketing tool. All employ the word in a vague and general fashion, but seldom with regard to specific programs, innovations or planes. To do so would be on one hand statistically manipulative, and on the other hand a potential form of market suicide, undercutting the presumption of air safety in general. Not to mention the humiliation a given carrier would endure should a disaster transpire.
For airline A to sell itself as safer than everyone else, there needs to be a presumption of danger aboard its competitors. This would entail some dubious statistical maneuvering. In the United States, approximately one of every 2.3 million commercial departures will be involved in some type of accident, whether minor or catastrophic. Distributing the data airline to airline, the odds do change, but only barely. Since the terror attacks of 2001, American Airlines has had one fatal accident; the other network carriers none. It would be shamelessly underhanded, if mathematically accurate, for United or Delta to promote themselves a better bet than American.
That'll induce some snickering, and few of us require a primer on the ruthlessness of corporate advertising. But in this case there's a risk factor that compels the airlines into a collective honesty. With casualties so rare, the statistical swing from a "safe" airline to a "dangerous" one hinges on select few events drawn from thousands, or even millions, of departures. Reputations can be lost through a single act of folly or stroke of lousy luck. Quite understandably, airlines have no desire to put their competitive eggs in such a precarious basket.
That one American Airlines crash was the infamous flight 587 near Kennedy airport in November 2001. A widely publicized controversy arose over the tail construction of the particular model involved, the Airbus A300-600. A front-page feature in USA Today revealed that the plane's maker, Airbus Industrie, may have long known of potential defects in the tail's composite architecture. Such revelations, at least in some other businesses, would be juicy plums for marketers. "Fly Northwest, A300-Free Service to 200 Cities." That's a caricature, but even though no other U.S. passenger carrier uses the A300, none went anywhere near the issue; they were sensibly loath to set up a tit-for-tat based exclusively on numerical minutiae, knowing that should a tragedy -- or even two tragedies -- befall the braggart, suddenly the tables would spin.
Furthermore, the moment any airline dares put safety into the mix, the issue loses its statistical context and becomes a play on passenger emotions. All airlines will suffer if an already nervous public begins to openly and increasingly contemplate its mortality while surfing Travelocity. No carrier, big or small and especially after Sept. 11, wants to go stoking this excitable fire. Flying is safe and a majority of people, including most fearful fliers, assent to this reality with little or no protest. That's good enough for the airlines.
Having said all that, there are ways to play the game slyly. An airline is never faulted for boasting that its crews receive the best training possible; the preflight demo rambles imperatively on seat belts and oxygen masks; the captain reminds you that nothing is more important than the well-being of everybody onboard. But this is not a mass-market pitch. Protocol permits any airline to call itself safe. Just not safer.
