Holistic safety rating for airlines favours bigger carriers

An independent European agency has come up with a fresh way of ranking commercial airlines in terms of their overall safety.

The agency, Air Transport Rating Agency (ATRA), is using a set of 15 criteria to establish what it considers to be a revolutionary way of comparing the safety culture of airlines.

ATRA says its "holistic safety rating" provides "original, concise and independent synthetic information" to complement the simplicity of accident rankings.

"The publication by the European Commission of a 'Black List' of airlines not meeting the minimum safety criteria has represented real progress," ASTRA says. "That nevertheless can lead one to infer that all the airlines not on this list have exactly the same safety profile. This is, in fact, far from true as numerous criteria contribute to safety and no airlines are identical on all the criteria, even if they meet the criteria required to avoid appearing on the black list."

ATRA is using detailed technical reports, ad-hoc ratings, specific advanced data analyses, modelling and simulations, accident and incident analyses, etc.

The Agency says it is independent of airlines, manufacturers, regulatory authorities, trade unions and not-for-profit organizations.

It says its safety rating computes 15 criteria contributing directly or indirectly to general safety from the top 100 most important airlines.

The 15 selected criteria are:

* Net financial result

* Total number of passengers

* Total number of employees

* Total number of cabin crew employees

* Total number of aircraft

* Average fleet age in service

* Percentage of aircraft on order

* Fleet homogeneity

* Number of aircraft no longer in production

* Number of aircraft considered at risk

* Total aircraft-km flown

* In house maintenance capability

* Number of accidents during the last 10 years

* Dedicated flight academy pilot-training facilities

* Dedicated full flight simulators

The Top 10 airlines rated according to this approach are (in alphabetical order only):

Air France/KLM

American Airlines

British Airways

Continental Airlines

Delta Airlines

Japan Airlines

Lufthansa

Southwest Airlines

United Airlines

US Airways

Seems to be a lot of US content in that list, which has to make one a little wary of the validity of the methodology. After all, with the criteria including number of passengers and number of aircraft, it is inevitable that the biggest airlines are going to put in an appearance.