by Pixie Clearwater

Created on: August 16, 2010   Last Updated: August 17, 2010

Statistically you are more likely to be killed by either a pineapple or donkey than in a plane crash. In fact, the odds actually suggest that only one in eight million flights will result in serious incident.  However, despite these assuring statistics the likelihood of an accident while you're on board an aircraft can be greatly affected by the airline that you are travelling with. As in any other business, some companies can boast more impressive safety records than others and it is vital that the eager traveller can interpret these statistics to ensure that they are going to fly with a highly reliant and safe airline.

The means of calculating an airline's safety records are often misleading and confusing because of the wide range of statistics and numbers that are used. The numbers can often be distorted by the amount of passengers and flights that the airline deals with on an annual basis. For example, a large airline with one fatal accident will prove to have a much more impressive safety record than a smaller airline also with one fatal accident. Furthermore, fatal accidents are described as an incident in which one passenger was killed, therefore an airline will have a fatal accident listed on their history no matter how many people are killed. This means that an air craft that crashes losing all passengers, this could be upward of 500 people if it was a Boeing 747 would be struck with one fatal accident on the safety records, the same would happen to another airline that crashed killing only one person. Hence the indiscretions in the statistics.

Therefore to overcome some of these problems, data has been collected from numerous sources including the American NTSB, Europe and further afield in Asia. The statistics have been individually analysed with information on the number of fatal incidents, minor incidents, total number of passengers killed or injured and the number of passengers and flights per annum. Naturally there remains flaws in this system but it gives an ideal overview of the safest airlines in the world.

Qantas boasts one of the proudest and longest safety records in world aviation. Despite the company been founded nearly ninety years ago, they have not lost one passenger jet. This is even more impressive bearing in mind that Qantas planes fly internationally across a total of 14 countries, this includes numerous long haul flights. Their last fatal accident was in 1951, when seven people were killed when a Qantas plane

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