The safest way to travel is with the Arab airlines Etihad and Emirates

The Arab airlines Etihad and Emirates in particular were safe in 2022. In a risk analysis, the airlines from the United Arab Emirates are ahead of the Dutch KLM, the American JetBlue and the British Easyjet.

In the analysis of the Hamburg flight accident agency Jacdec, the Swiss parent company Lufthansa took 14th place in the global ranking of the 25 companies with the highest traffic performance.

Etihad, not evaluated in 2021, pushed Emirates into second place. Both companies have relatively young fleets, according to the report published in the aviation magazine “Aero International” (February issue).

After the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Russian airline Aeroflot was significantly devalued, landing only in 25th place. Security reasons for the devaluation included the illegal admission of Western leased aircraft to the Russian register and the interruption of spare parts supply in Russia due to economic sanctions .

The Jacdec risk index is based on each airline’s accident history over the past 30 years, the country-specific environment in which it operates and aviation-specific risk factors. Theoretically, an index value of 100 is achievable, but even the best companies fall short. The number of passenger kilometers flown by the airlines is important: the more of these an airline travels without an accident, the lower the risk and therefore the safer it is in this ranking.

Of the busiest operators in Europe, Finnair achieved the highest index value, followed by KLM and Transavia. Lufthansa’s core business was 15th in this traffic region. In short, in the year of the restart after the Corona silence in civil aviation, an extremely high safety level has been reached again, according to head of analysis Jan-Arwed Richter. Individual events thus had a particularly strong influence on the statistics.

The March 21 crash of a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 near the southern Chinese city of Wuzhou was cited as the worst accident of the year. All 132 people on board were killed. The accident was believed to have been due to the suicide of the co-pilot. Jacdec relies on insider information, while Chinese investigative authorities have so far kept a low profile.

In total, Jacdec registered 19 fatal flying accidents last year, in which a total of 233 people died. That was 60 deaths more than in 2021, when there was significantly less flying. The average over the past ten years is 372 deaths.

According to the aviation association IATA, commercial air traffic worldwide reached only a small 71 percent of passenger volume last year compared to the pre-corona year 2019. For 2023, the organization hopes for a recovery of no less than 85 percent of the volume of 2019 (saw/sda /dpa)