AirlineRatings.com, an Australian aviation analysis website, just released its annual list of the world's safest airlines. The United States did... okay? Two American airlines—Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines—made it to the top 20 list.
To note: The site selected 20 picks from the 409 airlines that it usually monitors, but didn't rank said picks. Here they are listed in alphabetical order:
- Air New Zealand
- Alaska Airlines
- All Nippon Airways
- British Airways
- Cathay Pacific Airways
- Emirates
- Etihad Airways
- EVA Air
- Finnair
- Hawaiian Airlines
- Japan Airlines
- KLM
- Lufthansa
- Qantas
- Royal Jordanian Airlines
- Scandinavian Airline System
- Singapore Airlines
- Swiss
- Virgin Atlantic
- Virgin Australia
To determine the ranking, the site uses a seven-star rating system that takes into account different safety factors, including records of crashes, serious incidents and fleet age in addition to audits from a bunch of aviation-related governing bodies.
“All airlines have incidents every day and many are aircraft manufacture issues, not airline operational problems," writes Geoffrey Thomas, the site's editor-in-chief, in the official announcement. "And it is the way the flight crew handles incidents that determines a good airline from an unsafe one. So just lumping all incidents together is very misleading."
Of course, a "best of" list comes at the expense of a "worst of" list. The lowest-rated airlines on the list are, in alphabetical order: Air Koryo (North Korea), Blue Wing Airlines (Suriname), Buddha Air (Nepal), Nepal Airlines (Nepal), Tara Air (Nepal), Trigana Air Service (Indonesia) and Yeti Airlines (Nepal).
In case all this talk about airlines got you in the mood for a trip, here are the best winter vacations to take in America.