Cockpit Confidential (32 page)

Few of us require a primer on the ruthlessness of corporate advertising, but in this case there's a risk factor that compels the airlines into a collective quiet. With casualties so rare, the statistical swing from a “safe” airline to a “dangerous” one hinges on select few events drawn from hundreds of thousands of departures. Reputations can be lost through a single act of folly or stroke of lousy luck. Quite understandably, airlines have no desire to put their competitive eggs in such a precarious basket.

Furthermore, the moment any airline dares put safety into the mix, the issue loses its statistical context and becomes a play on passenger emotions. All airlines will suffer if, in effect, passengers are encouraged to openly contemplate their mortality while surfing Travelocity. Flying is safe, and a majority of people, including most fearful flyers, assent to this reality with little or no fuss. That's good enough for the airlines.

Having said all that, there are ways to play the game slyly. An airline is never faulted for boasting that its crews receive the best training possible; the preflight demo rambles imperatively of seat belts and oxygen masks; the captain reminds you that nothing is more important than the well-being of everybody on board. But these are not mass-market pitches. Protocol permits any airline to call itself safe. Just not
safer
.

Just because an airline doesn't showboat its safety initiatives doesn't mean they don't exist. Cynics will be eager to cite a seeming trail of greed and negligence: airlines found culpable for certain crashes, fines for maintenance violations, and so on. But I hasten to remind you how much a carrier stands to lose should one of its planes go down. Liability can run into the billions, and a single disaster can destroy an airline outright. Hard as it might be for some of you to accept, to suggest the industry, along with its federal overseers, are playing fast and loose with the lives of the traveling public is a terrible distortion.

We should start by acknowledging that there is virtually no such thing as a “dangerous” airline, anywhere. Some are safer than others, but even the least safe airline is still very safe.

The region of the world with the worst reputation by far is sub-Saharan Africa, where scores of small companies operate without anywhere near the oversight or resources of airlines in the West. But even here the statistics can be misleading. It's important to make the distinction between mainline African carriers and lower-tier cargo and nonscheduled operators. Flying on South African Airways or Ethiopian Airlines, for example, which have perfectly respectable records, is not the same as flying aboard some ad-hoc Congolese cargo runner or a Guinean charter outfit. Africa's “dangerous” airlines are not even airlines as most people think of them.

“Americans have no reason to be afraid of foreign carriers,” says Robert Booth of AvMan, an aviation consulting firm in Miami. “Plenty of these companies have cultures of safety that meet or exceed our own,” he points out.

That's a sensible assessment, though some airlines have had a tough time shaking their bad reputations. Russia's Aeroflot, for example. Once upon a time, measured in raw crash totals, Aeroflot had a comparatively poor record. On the face of it, anyway. Several asterisks were required, not the least of which was that Aeroflot, in its heydays, was a gigantic entity roughly the size of all U.S. airlines
put together
, and it engaged in all manner of far-flung operations to outposts as remote as Antarctica. During the 1990s, Aeroflot was splintered into dozens of independent carriers, one of which—still the largest, but nowhere near the heft of the original—inherited the Aeroflot name and identity. Based in Moscow, the Aeroflot that exists today operates about 120 aircraft and transports 14 million passengers annually. Since 1994, it has had only two serious accidents, one of them at the hands of a subsidiary.

Korean Air is another. In 1999, Korean was put under FAA sanction and had a code-sharing arrangement with Delta temporarily severed after an earlier string of fatal incidents. People still hold this against them, despite the Korean government's ambitious overhaul of its entire air system, and despite a sterling critique by ICAO in 2008. It ranked Korea's aviation safety standards, including its pilot training and maintenance, as the highest in the world, beating out more than a hundred other countries.

Frankly, in certain regions I'd be more comfortable with a local carrier that knows its territory and the quirks of flying there. One example I love to cite is Bolivia's LAB—Lloyd Aereo Boliviano—the former national airline of one of the poorest countries in South America. LAB is gone now, but from 1925 through 2008 it plied the treacherous peaks of the Andes in and out of La Paz, the planet's most highly situated commercial airport. Since 1969, LAB suffered only two fatal crashes on scheduled passenger runs, killing a total of 36 people. This was not a mainstay airline making thousands of daily flights, but two crashes in thirty-four years amid jagged mountains and the hazards of the high Altiplano was exemplary.

Or how about Ethiopian Airlines? Here is another impoverished country surrounded by rugged terrain. Yet the record of its national carrier, over seven decades of operations—three fatal events, one of them a hijacking—is exceptional. Ethiopian is one of the proudest and arguably one of the safest airlines in the world.

Following is a list of airlines that have gone fatality-free for at least the past thirty years. All qualifying airlines have been in existence since at least 1980:

• Aer Lingus
  
• Air Berlin
  
• Air Jamaica (now part of Caribbean Airlines)
  
• Air Malta
  
• Air Mauritius
  
• Air New Zealand
  
• Air Niugini (Papua New Guinea)
  
• Air Portugal
  
• Air Seychelles
  
• Air Tanzania
  
• All Nippon Airways
  
• Austrian Airlines
  
• Bahamasair
  
• Cathay Pacific
  
• Cayman Airways
  
• Finnair
  
• Hawaiian Airlines
  
• Icelandair
  
• Meridiana (Italy)
  
• Monarch Airlines (UK)
  
• Oman Air
  
• Qantas
  
• Royal Brunei
  
• Royal Jordanian
  
• Syrianair
  
• Thomsonfly (formerly Britannia Airways)
  
• Tunisair
  
• Tyrolean Airways (Austria)
  

I chose 1980 to best account for the changeover period from older, first-generation jets and propliners to what most would consider modern fleets. Most of the companies listed have perfect records pre-dating that year. Several, including Air Jamaica, Oman Air, and Tunisair, have
never
recorded a fatality. Allowing for
one
fatal mishap since 1980 takes in, just for starters, Royal Air Maroc, TACA, and Yemenia. Even the much-maligned Air Afrique, a West African collective that went bust in 2001, listed but a single accident in over three-plus decades of flying. Ghana Airways, another African star until its demise in 2004, had an even cleaner record, marred by a single fatality in 1969.