Wishy Washy - but provides a reasonable answer!
Interesting topic and I will make an attempt to bring it back on track.
I will make the immediate assumption that the topic is in light of the recent Gulf of Mexico incident concerning BP and the current situation with it and most likely result of it being the worst environmental disaster caused by an oil spill in the history of oil exploration! And that this is to be compared with the chances of EK, through similar disregard to safety may cause the biggest air disaster; that title currently being held by KLM/PAN AM and a small number of Spanish ATC personnel – with KLM as custodian of the award.
Let’s look first at Oil. There are ~880,000 oil wells globally – how many were drilled by BP? I have no idea and cannot for the life of me find out (at least so far!). So we will have to be a little artistic with this… so let’s make use of Pareto and deduce that 80% of those fields were drilled by the companies that produce 20% of global oil. Hence 704,000 wells were drilled by a very small number of companies, probably just 5 (five)! And let’s assume they all play an equal part (20%) – thus BP are likely to have drilled 140,800 wells. With the average productive life of a well being ~7-8 years and one may agree that BP have had 4 (four) catastrophes in their history. Conclusion? 4 disasters in 8.64 billion ‘well hours’. Or one major (catastrophic) incident every 2.15 billion ‘well hours’.
Now let’s look at EK and apply a similar approach.
To answer your question, is EK the next BP – EK would have to be writing off an aircraft off (perhaps by missing the runway and smashing into the terminal – trying to put some proportion/scale in the equation!) once every 2.15 billion flight hours. I believe EK have 141 aircraft – I don’t proclaim to know their utilisation and that will of course differ across fleet types, but let’s take an industry average of 13 hours a day. This gives EK around about 700,000 flight hours per year; thus for EK to branded ‘as bad’ as BP – they would have to have more than one major catastrophe sometime in the next ~3200 years. Chances of that happening – pretty good I imagine – if airplanes and pilots last that long! But just the same for anyone else too.
Thus I would conclude that EK are probably not as safe as BP, but it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things because the industry will change significantly long before the year 5210!