These are the world's safest airlines

Australian airline Qantas has been ranked as the world’s safest airline

Australian airline Qantas has once again been ranked as the world’s safest airline.

Aviation website AirlineRatings.com recently released its annual list of the world’s safest airlines which also featured Emirates and Etihad Airways among others.



"Qantas continues to lead the industry with safety innovations and its fleet is now the youngest -- 7.9 years – it has been since the airline was privatised in 1995," AirlineRatings.com editor Geoffrey Thomas told the CNN. The editor also said that Qantas has done fairly well and grabbed the benchmark for the best practice, taking the lead in almost every aspect throughout the past 60 years.

Rest of the airlines that made it to the top safest airlines, in alphabetical order, are: Air New Zealand, British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways, Emirates, Etihad Airways, EVA Air, Finnair, Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines.

"Our top 10 safest airlines are always at the forefront of safety innovation and launching new planes," Thomas added. The rating system is based on collection of airlines’ operational histories, incident records and excellence.



The rating site has also given a list of the top 10 safest low cost airlines which in alphabetical order are: Aer Lingus (Ireland), Alaska Airlines (US), Icelandair (Iceland), Jetblue (US), Jetstar (Australia), Kulula.com (South Africa), Monarch Airlines (UK), Thomas Cook (UK), TUIfly (Germany) and WestJet (Canada).

"Unlike a number of low cost carriers these airlines have all passed the stringent International Air Transport Association Operational Safety Audit audit and have excellent safety records," Thomas said. "Low cost does not mean low safety."

World’s unsafest airlines

Further, the website also released a list of the world’s unsafest airlines. The site reduces one star of any airline if it has had a crash that involves the death of a passenger and/or crew member.  "A crash involving fatalities carries with it a one star deduction for 10 years from the date of the incident," the rating policy of the website read.

Of the surveyed 449 airlines, some 50 had three or less stars.



Four airlines failed miserably in the survey and got only one star, including Nepal’s Tara Air and Nepal Airlines, Kazakhstan’s Scat Airlines, and Afghanistan’s Kam Air. These four fliers have been banned from flying within the European Union.

The article originally appeared on CNN.