There’s a few things we’re world leaders at here in the UK. Some you will have heard about – like football and fish ’n’ chips – others are a bit more niche. For instance, we’re doing pretty well in the world of budget airline safety rankings.
Okay, that’s very niche, but it’s still important. After all, when you book a flight you do ideally want to make it to your destination in one piece, even if you have only spent £20 on your ticket. That’s why Airlineratings.com, which specialises in, you guessed it, rating airlines, spends a lot of time trying to figure out who you are safest with should you choose to travel through the sky.
How does Airlineratings.com measure safety? Very thoroughly. It’s not just about crashes or deaths – although those are counted – they also look at fleet size and age, the skill level and amount of training given to pilots, the rate of emergency ‘incidents’, and if they have historically passed safety audits. All of this information is collated and then standardised across a huge list of airlines from across the world.
This year, in the top 15 budget airlines, two were British, and a further one was from Ireland. EasyJet, in fourth, Ryanair, in third, and Jet2, in fourteenth, all have perfect safety ratings of seven out of seven, meaning that they are very reliable, despite all having somewhat low passenger ratings.
Part of what has allowed these carriers to place so highly is their large fleet sizes with, comparably, very few accidents. It is easier for larger companies to score highly as one incident out of hundreds of flights is penalised less than the same amount but across fewer journeys. This doesn’t mean that these operators are not as trustworthy as it would seem; it just explains why we rarely see smaller ones, such as LoganAir or Aer Lingus, appear on these lists.
Another of our high fliers, British Airways, also appeared on the overall worldwide list, which you can learn more about here.
Now that you know your chosen airline is very safe, next time you fly you can worry about other, more important things, like why a microwaved Margarita pizza costs £16 in the terminal, or what the couple sitting in the row behind you are arguing about.
Eyes on the skies
There’s loads more where that came from. It turns out that none of the world’s most on-time airports or airlines are in the UK. On the bright side, BA just announced a loyalty programme, and here's everything you need to know if you're travelling abroad sometime soon. See here for the full list of exciting new flights launching from UK airports this winter.
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