No one, who actually is in the aviation industry would ever bring up those stupid rankings.
But this one is only for Al Fakim. Do not want to start a discussion about it...
Airline A:
fleet size: 300 aircraft
flights per day: 2000 flights (mostly short range)
Accidents: 2 in the last 60 years (100 fatalities)
0 in the last 15 years
Type of airports 10 % Cat C; 30 % Cat B; 60 % Cat A
Number of destinations: 165
Airline B:
fleet size: 100 aircraft
flights per day: 500 flights (mostly long range)
Accidents: 1 in the last 60 years (30 fatalities)
0 in the last 15 years
Type of airports 12 % Cat C; 22 % Cat B; 66 % Cat A
Number of destinations: 45
Who dares to pick the "safer" airline? Most statistics only consider number of accidents and number of fatalities. In this case Airline B would be "safer".. On the other hand, airline B would have had 4 accidents with 120 fatalities if it would have performed 2000 instead of 500 flights. But maybe it wouldn't have??
Or airline A: If it had only performed 500 flights a day, number of accidents would be 0.5 (
) with only 25 fatalities. On the other hand, those two accidents might still have happened in the remaining 500 flights?
So, this is just to give you a basic idea, how hard it is to really have a fair statistic on aviation safety. A couple of facts on which airline has the more effective flight safety department (and how do you want to measure it) and so on would further complicate the statistic.