The Hamburg-based Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre (JACDEC) has again named Emirates Airline as the world’s safest airline in a survey carried out for Aero International aviation magazine, media reports said.
Emirates Airline is the world’s largest operator of double-decker Airbus A380s – the largest passenger jet in history.
With a risk index of 95.05 percent, Emirates beat its nearest rivals KLM (93.31 percent), JetBlue (91.61 percent), Delta (91.55 percent) and easyJet (91.28 percent) among the 25 airlines surveyed, the reports said.
For the first time, JACDEC also published regional rankings, which compare the world’s largest airlines within one of four regions.
On a regional level, Emirates slipped behind another Gulf airline, Etihad Airways, which due to its size did not make it onto the global list.
In Europe, KLM (93.31) took first place, ahead of Finnair (93.16), Air Europa (93.12), Transavia (92.83), easyJet (91.28) and Norwegian (90.95).
The creation of regional categories was “primarily due to the changed size ratios, which shifted in favor of many airlines with strong domestic markets such as China or the US,” explained JACDEC founder Jan-Arwed Richter.
Due to pandemic-related slumps in the aviation industry in 2021, and only a timid resurgence of passenger numbers, past airline accidents had a greater impact on results this time.
The sources said that well-known airlines such as Austrian, Eurowings and Condor didn’t make it to the European Top 25 due to insufficient passenger-kilometer performance in 2021.
The Director-General of the airline association IATA, Willie Walsh said that even before the emergence of the Omicron variant and the renewed restrictions that followed it, aviation industry losses due to the pandemic has equaled almost 200 billion dollars.
According to sources, Walsh predicted a total loss of 52 billion dollars for 2021 and of 12 billion dollars in 2022, before the aviation industry finally returns to making profits in 2023.
