The world’s safest airlines have been revealed by a leading aviation group and two British carriers as well as two from Australia have made the top 20.
Both British Airways and Virgin Atlantic are in the 2018 safest list along with Virgin Australia and Qantas, which was noted for not having a fatality in the jet era.
Other carriers that were singled out for praise include Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, Cathay Pacific as well as Middle Eastern-based Emirates and Etihad.
British Airways has made the list of the top 20 safest airlines alongside fellow UK carrier Virgin Atlantic
Australia-based AirlineRatings.com has ranked the top 20 safest airlines in alphabetical order, with others in the list including Singapore Airlines, Air New Zealand, KLM and Lufthansa.
Each year the airline review website studies airline safety and bases its rankings on audits from aviation governing bodies, government audits, airline’s crash and serious incident records and fleet age.
And as well as looking at the safest airlines, it also studies the least safe, which it says includes Air Koryo, North Korea’s state airline, Indonesia’s Trigana Air Service and Nepal Airlines, the country’s flag carrier.
Others that made the least safe list were Bluewing Airlines based in Suriname, Buddha Air, Tara Air and Yeti Airlines, all from Nepal.
Meanwhile, AirlineRatings.com also identified the top ten safest low cost airlines.
British-based Flybe and Thomas Cook, US carriers JetBlue, Frontier and Virgin America and Australian airline Jetstar all make the list.
Making up the top ten are Aer Lingus, HK Express, Vueling and Westjet.
Qantas also made the top 20 safest list and was singled out for not having a fatality in the jet era
Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of AirlineRatings.com, said: ‘All airlines have incidents every day and many are aircraft manufacture issues, not airline operational problems.
‘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.
‘Our Top 20 safest airlines are always at the forefront of safety innovation, operational excellence and the launching of new more advanced aircraft like the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787.’
News of the research comes as it was revealed that 2017 was one of the safest on record for commercial air travel.
Dutch aviation consulting firm To70 and the Aviation Safety Network both reported that there were no commercial passenger jet fatalities over the past 12 months.
The last fatal passenger jet airliner accident worldwide took place in November 2016 near Medellin, Colombia, where 71 people were killed including 22 players from Brazilian football team Chapecoense.