A REPORT which claims to rank the world's major airlines, using data about their fatal-accident history, has been issued by the US-based Air Travelers Association, a newly established lobby group for airline passengers.
The Airline Safety Report Card covers 260 scheduled passenger airlines around the world - 29 of which were listed as having "failed" on the safety front. David Stempler, head of Air Travelers and a former executive director of the International Airline Passenger Association, says that the report is based on raw data from a leading UK-based insurance loss-adjuster. It rates the airlines of 107 countries which use Western-built aircraft and have operated at least 20,000 flights between 1987 and 1996.
Although 52 airlines were reported to have had 82 fatal accidents in 125 million flights, the 260 airlines as a group achieve high marks for safety. The bulk of these are in the Grade A category. These include American Airlines, British Airways and Lufthansa. "Failure" grades, however, are ascribed to 29 airlines in 22 countries. The latter includes Avianca, Aeroflot, Ethiopian Airlines, Lan Chile, Lauda Air, Libyan Arab Airlines, Martinair Holland, Philippine Airlines and ValuJet. The assessments "-reflect the past performance of the airlines, and are not a predictor of the future", the Association says.
The US Federal Aviation Administration offers safety data on US air carriers, but will not rank airlines by accident records. It also says that safety data frequently do not offer statistically significant distinctions among carriers.
Source: Flight International
