Hamburg, Jan. 3 (BUS): Emirates Airlines has once again been named the safest airline in the world by the Hamburg-based Jet Crash Data Evaluation Center (JACDEC).
The world’s largest operator of the double-decker Airbus A380 – the largest passenger aircraft in history – has successfully defended its first position in a survey conducted by JACDEC for aviation magazine Aero International, German news agency DPA reported.
With a risk index of 95.05 percent, Emirates outperformed its closest competitors KLM (93.31 percent), JetBlue (91.61), Delta (91.55) and EasyJet (91.28) among the 25 airlines surveyed.
For the first time, JACDEC has also published regional rankings comparing the world’s largest airlines in one of four regions.
At the regional level, Emirates has fallen behind another Gulf airline, Etihad Airways, which due to its size has not made it to the global list.
In Europe, KLM (93.31) took first place, ahead of Finnair (93.16), Air Europe (93.12), Transavia (92.83), easyJet (91.28) and Norwegian (90.95).
JACDEC founder Jean Aroyd Richter explained that the creation of the regional categories was “primarily due to changing volume ratios, which have shifted in favor of many airlines with strong domestic markets such as China or the United States”.
Due to the pandemic-related stagnation in the aviation industry throughout 2021, as well as the timid resurgence of passenger numbers, previous airline accidents had a bigger impact on results this time around.
Some well-known airlines such as Austrian, Eurowings and Condor did not even reach the top 25 in Europe due to insufficient performance of passenger kilometers in 2021.
Even before the Omicron variant and the renewed restrictions that followed, total airline industry losses due to the pandemic had already totaled about $200 billion, according to Willie Walsh, director general of the IATA airline association.
Walsh predicted a total loss of $52 billion for 2021 and $12 billion in 2022 before the airline industry finally returns to profitability in 2023.
MI