If you’re a nervous traveler like, say, Rain Man, you’ll be interested to know that Qantas is the safest airline in the world, according to a new list from AirlineRatings.com. (Just like Rain Man said!)
The Australian airline has nabbed the top spot on the annual list since 2014, although technically it was a joint winner in 2018, when the website didn’t rank the top 20, according to CNN Travel. United Airlines is back on the list after the ranking left it out it last year.
AirlineRatings.com put together its list by sourcing data from 405 airlines, looking at points like government audits, crash and serious incident records, and, for some reason, profitability. While Qantas has the top spot, Finnair and Hawaiian are not far behind with “perfect records in the jet era,” according to a press release.
The top 20 are the usual suspects of decent airlines. Here they are in alphabetical order (which is how AirlineRatings.com presents the list):
- Air New Zealand
- Alaska Airlines
- All Nippon Airways
- American Airlines
- Austrian Airlines
- British Airways
- Cathay Pacific Airways
- Emirates
- EVA Air
- Finnair
- Hawaiian Airlines
- KLM
- Lufthansa
- Qantas
- Qatar Airways
- SAS
- Singapore Airlines
- Swiss
- United Airlines
- Virgin Atlantic
- Virgin Australia
Surprisingly absent from the list is Delta, but honestly the promise of Biscoff cookies means I’ll still fly them (I’m only human). We reached out to Delta for comment.
This year, the AirlineRatings.com editors also identified the top 10 safest low-cost airlines, if you like to reenact the real-world equivalent of that old Jack Benny joke about weighing your money or your life. In alphabetical order:
- Flybe
- Frontier
- HK Express
- JetBlue
- Jetstar Australia/Asia
- Thomas Cook
- Volaris
- Vueling
- WestJet
- Wizz
Finally, if you’re looking for airlines to avoid, AirlineRatings.com also announced its lowest-ranked airlines, including two Afghani airlines: Ariana Afghan Airlines and Kam Air, as well as Suriname’s Blue Wing Airlines, Nepal’s Tara Air, and Jakarta-based Trigana Air Service.
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