The golf airline Emirates was the safest airline in the world in 2019. This was the result of the annual security ranking of the Hamburg aviation security office Jacdec in cooperation with the aviation magazine "Aero International", which was published on Thursday.
With a risk index of 95.48 percent, Emirates is just ahead of another golf airline, Etihad Airways (95.21 percent). Last year's winner Finnair only reached fourth place behind Spanish Air Europa .
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Jacdec ranking: the safest airlines in the worldThe evaluation includes the 100 airlines with the highest traffic performance worldwide. The results are presented as a percentage, with the values being oriented downwards from the (only theoretically achievable) maximum value of 100 percent. 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.
With the airlines from the German-speaking countries it was at best enough for a place in the middle. Bad luck was especially suffered by Lufthansa , which slipped from 21st in the previous year to 56th. The reason was a mishap on the part of the ground staff on July 30 in Frankfurt, who steered a mobile passenger staircase into the rear of a transport jet already waiting with passengers on board. The aircraft was irreparably damaged and therefore ended up as a total loss on the balance sheet.
Fewer deaths due to rapidly increasing passenger air traffic
2019 was one of the safest years in commercial aviation, a few days ago the Federal Association of the German Aviation Industry (BDL) also said - and points out that there were no fatalities in this area of aviation in Germany or in the European Union's airspace. Accidents involving military machines or airplanes with fewer than 14 passenger seats do not appear in the statistics.
Although a new edition of the safest international year in the history of commercial civil aviation so far - 2017 - with 40 accidental deaths seems a long way off: The number of black sheep at airlines or regulators is decreasing year by year.
"In 2019, the trend that has been recognizable for decades continues that there will be fewer and fewer deaths in accidents if passenger air traffic rises sharply," says Thomas Borchert of "Aero International". In 2019, the airlines connected to IATA carried around 4.5 billion passengers - 14 times as many as in 1970.
The statistical likelihood of dying from an airplane crash has decreased on average from 1 in 264,000 to 1 in 15,874,000 since 1970. "Flying was 60 times safer in 2019 than in the 1970s," the BDL calculates. Security standards have risen worldwide for years. Improved training of the crews and the global networking of the aviation industry help to learn from accidents and to make flying safer overall.
Boeing 737 Max: Another misfortune, "fortunately we were spared"
According to Jacdec founder Jan-Arwed Richter, the almost halving of the number of accident fatalities compared to the previous year is also due to the fact that the US manufacturer Boeing had to leave his B737 Max crash plane on the ground from March.
"After everything that has so far come to light through documents and the hearing before the US Congress, a further operation would very likely have led to another accident, which luckily we were spared," says Richter.
On March 10, 157 people died on board a Boeing 737 Max 8 in Ethiopia. Since it was the second crash of such a jet after problems with the automatic trim support in a short time, there was an ongoing, worldwide flight ban and, finally, a production stop for this model.
Richter believes that the consequences of the damage to Boeing's image have not yet been endured. "2019 was a very ambivalent year of flight safety: on the one hand, we received confirmation that the excellent level of safety had improved again, and on the other hand, the 737-MAX scandal also revealed an abyss of systemic deficiencies in the aircraft industry, the elimination of which will occupy the industry even longer."
