Is there a ranking of airlines (esp. US domestic) by safety stats? Also, please feel free to add your personal experiences. If you do, please explain if these were incidents the airline had control over (i.e.: rude staff or incorporative help in rescheduing vs. an uncontrollable delay).
Thanks,
Airsafe.com has tons of information anyway that you would to dice it. There are airlines such as Southwest that have had no major accidents.
I hear good things about Oceanic!
I don’t think Qantas has ever had an accident.
Yeah, Qantas. Definitely Qantas.
Quantas never crashed.
You would be better off driving on the not-so-dangerous backroads.
Qantas never crashed. Uh oh, fart.
In reality, they’ve had a bunch of accidents on prop flights.
Neither Quantas nor Southwest have ever had a FATAL accident.
Did your dad let you drive slow on the driveway?
True, but they cheat a bit when they say this.
In 1999, a Qantas 747 skidded off the end of the runway at Bangkok, smashing through the perimeter fence, and coming to rest on a golf course. An engine or two were ripped off the thing, and it suffered extensive damage to the underside of the fuselage. This accident was entirely Qantas’ fault: their flight crew had been told not to use reverse thrust when landing, in order to save fuel. However, this particular aircraft, when on approach to BKK, was radioed by the pilot of an Alitalia plane, and warned that the runway was very wet and slick. Touchdown, and the pilot ignored this advice, and commenced braking without reverse thrust. The co-pilot disagreed and attempted to engage it, but was overridden by the pilot. The lost vital seconds arguing, and ran out of runway. At least, that’s how I remember it.
Now, the cheating part comes in what happened later. The extensively damaged aircraft was repaired rather than replaced, even though the cost was greater. There have been two reasons given for this:
So yeah, cheating a bit. They are still a very safe airline, but I have heard (through friends who work for them) that they cut a lot more corners than they used to. Bird-struck panels, for example, used to be replaced with brand new panels as a matter of policy, no matter how minor the damage. Now, they call in the panel beaters.
I would only add, that with any “major” airline, the most dangerous part of the trip is the drive to and from the airport.
If you’re flying on a major carrier, I would not worry about this one bit.
Just IMHO…been through ups and downs, emergency landings, and aborted landings, etc. Sometimes I did find this out afterward, but I have never been truly in danger…even got my foot on national TV once after an emergency landing.
(news showed pax coming out of the airplane…I was third off, and just as my foot came out of the aircraft, they went to the football news!)
Don’t sweat it.
OT: Geeks usually have a machine somewhere that they name Qantas “because it never crashes”.
Yes, QANTAS* has not suffered a “hull loss”. The story from TLD is correct from my recollection. Spent more than the cost of a new aeroplane in order to be able to say that they have not had a hull loss.
It should be noted that there are other airlines in Australia that fly QANTAS tailed aircraft on behalf of QANTAS for some domestic routes. Their accident record would not be included in the QANTAS record.
QANTAS is probably not very useful to the OP though as they don’t fly domestic within the USA.
On the subject of shortcuts. Airline profit margins are becoming very tight, they need to cut costs where ever they can. The trick is in cutting costs without compromising safety. They do this by restructuring the company, paying their workers less, outsourcing maintenance to overseas contractors, using rostering programs that more efficiently use the flight crew’s available flight hours. Today’s flight crews generally work harder and get paid less than those from a few decades ago, but that is the price you pay to stay afloat in a competitive market.
*QANTAS does not have a “U”. It is an acronym standing for Queensland and Northern Territory Air Services.