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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

The comment section in TFA suggests it's not surprising with Qatar Airlines, or indeed with Middle Eastern airlines (I have no idea).

I mostly think of airline safety as binary, eg passing basic standards or not. Is there some data to understand the shades of grey in-between?

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Standards change wildly between countries and/or companies. Culture can also effect this a lot. For example strict respect for seniority in the culture where a person lower on the org chart will never ever question their superiors actions/opinions.

Also some companies do not have access to good maintenance/parts due to economic sanctions on their country of origin (or just lack of money). Though this should not be a problem for Qatar Airways.

Flight safety is about keeping up with a large number of factors. Someone surely has collected accident rates by region, nation, airline, etc.

Basically only airlines in advanced western nations get an automatic pass for me, the rest treated with suspicion and research if I had to fly with one.

>>> only airlines in advanced western nations get an automatic pass for me

This site https://airlinelist.com/ was posted earlier and has a section to track airlines by accidents. Except Virgin Airline you will see no other "advanced" western airline in the list of safe airlines! You should take a deep breath and reflect on your automatic trust in advanced western airlines, you might find it stems from an unconscious bias!

I wonder what the criteria is, BA is marked for a fatal accident... in 1985 (and I could be pedantic and point out that was a subsidiary, British Airtours). JAL also in 1985, El Al in 1977. ANA? 1971. I'm not sure if those are going to be as relevant to judging the modern safety practices of the airlines.

Also, what's the your criteria for "advanced"? Ryanair and Easyjet have no fatal accidents on that site, are you just counting long haul "proper" airlines with wide bodies and not short haul budget operators?

Please see my other comment before taking the above linked "list" seriously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34706914

For years there's been another ranking with much better methodology:

https://www.jacdec.de/airline-ranking/

Although there are still caveats, with the main one being that past performance does not directly translate to future results, especially if there were significant changes to the airline situation in the meantime. Checking the recent reports from the Aviation Herald can also be revealing:

https://avherald.com/

To be fair the big difference between Virgin (and Qatar, Emirates, etc.) and other major western airlines is that they were founded in the 80’s not in the 1920’s. Planes used to drop out of the sky all the time.

The list of "very safe airlines" there has lots of Western airlines. Having no history of accidents does not equal being safe, actually useful measure is number of accidents per flight hours (and even that is only useful for big airlines).

Anyway, even something like Qatar is fairly safe. To avoid REALLY unsafe airlines one should consult this list https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/eu-air-safet...

I see Qantas, which is a western airline by most definitions.

Though it's worth noting that Qantas have been acquiring smaller companies then slapping their badge on the planes and their uniforms on the pilots. It's only a matter of time before they start to slip down this list and regress to the mean.

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