Airline Safety Stats

[FairPayer]

Living in Asia and booked EVA Air back to London for family holiday. Wifes friends have convinced her that EVA Air have "the worst record for crashes" and I'm under pressure to fork out for new tickets with a percieved "safer" airline e.g. BA, Quantas etc.

Would appreciate two things:-
1. Any (objective) info on the state of play with EVA re standards of operation, age of fleet, quality of training and in particular safety.
2. A link to an Airline Safety league if there is such a thing i.e. Ranked by number of crashes as a % of flights or % of passengers carried etc.

I know the whole airline industry is very safe and even the "worst" airlines must meet very stringent safety standards, I make 40-50 flights a year 50% of which are long haul so I've flown with all types and always feel very safe. I'm basically looking for info to defuse a potentially tricky situation which could cost $'s or even worse end up with wife and young son scared of flying for no good reason.

[Airbus Girl]

If you take a look at

http://www.airsafe.com/events/regions/asia.htm

it lists all Asian airlines and the number of fatal accidents. Not ALL accidents, just the ones where there were fatalities.

Eva Air appears to have had none, compared to China Airlines which has had 10, the last in 2002, with a rate of 7.16, the highest in the list, by far.

The information goes back to 1970.

[PaperTiger]

Indeed, clicking on the EVA link on that page leads to this succinct message on the 'details' page.EVA Air has not had any passenger fatalities since it began service in 1991.I don't think they have had any crashes, period. Certainly no hull loss, even the 747 that caught fire in the hangar is back in service. 'Bout as good as it gets, I'd say.

Perhaps OP's wife should choose her friends with as much care as choosing an airline. Or maybe they were just winding her up?

[Pax Vobiscum]

As a (lapsed) actuary, I can tell you that it's difficult to produce a meaningful comparison of airline safety statistics. Because fatalities are (thankfully) an extremely rare event, you have to go back a long way to achieve anything more than a statement of who has had the most recent/worst accident (Swiss make a poor showing on AirSafe's league table, but I wouldn't claim this makes them 'unsafe'). On the other hand, who cares which was the 'safest' airline in 1970? Most will have radically changed their fleet, route structure and personnel since then.

Taking AirSafe's European stats as an example, the only thing it tells us with any degree of confidence is that Turkish have a substantially worse record than any other major 'European' carrier - but then they operate many flights in a different environment where (I guess) safety and ATC standards are not as rigorous as Western Europe. And in many cases the only alternative to a THY flight may be on a carrier with a worse record still!

[Golf Charlie Charlie]

I think Pax Vobiscum is right. While I think the crude statistics may offer pointers and indications about trends, they need to be interpreted carefully.

Eva Air only started flying in 1991. It has indeed had no fatal event or hull loss. One's sense is that it is indeed a safe airline and runs a pretty good operation overall, unlike China Airlines.

But is this statistically very meaningful ? A start-up airline rising to about 40 aircraft in 12 years (to maybe 100-200 flights a day) has conducted only a small percentage of the flights of, say, a United, an American, a Southwest, a British Airways or a Lufthansa in the same 12 years. These airlines have clocked up many more fatality free flights in the past 12 years than Eva Air has, even though one or two of these airlines I mention have actually experienced the odd fatal event. So, a small or a new carrier which has been trouble-free means relatively little in a statistical/risk assessment sense. Even an airline like Qantas, in its entire history, has probably clocked up roughly the same number of fatal free flights as these industry majors have in, say, 10 or so years.

When thinking about inherent risk at new or small carriers with no fatal losses, you then have to factor in all sorts of other non-numerical aspects such as management quality, regulatory oversight, operational procedures, maybe fleet quality, airport navaid quality over its particular network etc. etc. As a thought, here are five airlines which have had no fatal events in their history, for example : Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, Eva Air, Sri Lankan, Ukraine Airlines International. Can you compare these ?

If Eva Air were to sustain a fatal event, it would probably be pushed quite a way down the list to average or worse in terms of fatal events per number of flights flown. Precisely because international air travel is so safe, one accident can have a significant skew effect, much as Concorde went from infinitely safe to being (relatively speaking) highly unsafe on a flights-flown basis when compared with almost all Western subsonic airliners.