Airline safety should come with an investment style warning "Past performance is no guarantee of future performance". What really matters is that the airline's culture is "safe" and by that I don't mean walls full of safety posters, constant emails to staff imploring then to be safe and small minded, too often quoted cliches like "Safety is our first priority... etc." in every press release.
A safety culture is a rather nebulous thing and very hard to quantify. But the safest companies will have proper management. One that wants to hear bad news, one that is prepared to spend money training and one that trusts and supports its crews in its day to day operations. When any of these things are absent its employees soon realise that they are not a valued part of the system but a mere tiny cog. They then start thinking only of themselves and not as a player in larger game. It will work for a time, you may well end up with a perfect record for a period of time but then you get caught by something you didn't expect.
So what makes an airline safe is not what you can see, it is what you can't - if that makes sense?
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Last edited by Piltdown Man; 30th May 2016 at 13:03.
Reason: R's about face and missing worms.