Which airplane is the safest?

Question

Is there some source or research on crash statistics for each type of airplane? For example I want to know the number of crashes, fatalities, and the dates. I want to know which type of airplane has the safest record. Is there a correlation between the price of the ticket and the safety record?

Answer 1

All modern aircraft have to go through incredibly stringent safety checks and are essentially equally safe. Accidents are so rare that any apparent differences in aircraft safety are mostly meaningless statistical anomalies.

Airfleets.net has a chart of accidents per aircraft type, but it's not easy to make any practical conclusions about it. For example, the Boeing 737 has way more accidents than any other, but that's not because it's unsafe, it's because there are more 737s than any other jet plane. It's also been around since the 1960s, with many of the old planes still flying in places like Africa with poor maintenance and minimal oversight, which explains why every single 737 accident since 2000 (except one in northern Canada) has occurred in third-world countries. By some measures, in fact, the revised 737 "NG" (next generation) is among the world's safest aircraft, with one accident per 16 047 900 flight hours, meaning that, statistically, you'd need to sit in one for nearly two thousand years on average before it crashed.

There are also planes like the Airbus 340, the Airbus 380 "superjumbo" and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner that have never had a fatal accident, but they're also relatively new and comparatively rare. How do you even measure their safety?

All in all, the old saw about the taxi to the airport being far more dangerous than the flight still applies, but if you wish to minimize the odds of being in an accident, looking at the track record of the airline, the size of the plane (basically, the smaller the worse) and the conditions it has to fly in (mountains, bad weather, etc) will be more useful.

Answer 2

Rather than viewing safety as being a function of the aircraft, it's much more accurate to say safety is a function of the airline. To provide perspective, AirDisaster provides a ranked statistical analysis of selected aircraft by fatal accidents (accurate to 2004, so it omits the more recent models). Even the Concorde, the worst ranked plane, had a fatal accident only 0.001% of its flights.

Model                      Rate Events No. Flights Rank 

Saab 340                   0.33   3   9.0 Million   1 
McDonnell Douglas MD-80    0.45   9   20 Million    2 
Boeing 767                 0.46   3   6.5 Million   3 
Boeing 757                 0.56   4   7.2 Million   4 
Boeing 737                 0.62  47   76.0 Million  5 
Boeing 727                 0.66  46   70.0 Million  6 
Airbus A319/320/321        0.67   4   6.0 Million   7 
Fokker F-70/F-100          0.67   3   4.5 Million   7 
Embraer 120 Brasilia       0.71   5   7.0 Million   8 
McDonnell Douglas DC-9     0.76  42   55.5 Million  9 
...
Aerospatiale Concorde      12.5   1   0.08 Million 19 

If you compare that to its statistics on airline accidents, a number of airlines have higher rates than the worst aircraft. If you're concerned about safety, it's an irrational fear but you can try to mitigate that fear by avoiding airlines with a recent history of fatal accidents rather than trying to avoid specific aircraft.

Answer 3

The question is for a specific reason senseless, it is like asking what kind of radio is safest in an automobile.

The reason is simply that most fatalities are not caused by the type of plane, but by pilot errors, bad care or environmental influences (downburst etc.). There is no reason to believe some crashes would not have occured with exactly the same pilot, but a different plane. As a crash is always involved with very high speeds, the kind of body protection ("internal safety") a plane offers is also identical...that is to say none.

Naturally there are differences in safety: A small plane like a Cessna or Piper or military jets are much more unsafe than civil jets. But I presume you are asking for different types of civil jets.

What does exist are "safe" airlines: Airlines who have good pilots, new planes with good care and a "better safe than sorry" attitude.

Even if there would be numbers of crashes by plane type, they do not say anything. Because the importance of the type is neglible and crashes are very seldom, the numbers have a poission distribution: One airline X could have 15 crashes and airline Y 0 crashes without any difference in quality.

Answer 4

If you run the statistics, you will likely get different answers for:

• Safety per trip
• Safety per travel kilometer
• Safety per travel hour

You need to think about what you really want to know. You might also think about the causes of air transport accidents that result in deaths. They tend to be more often lapses in judgement, communication or training by the flight crew. In private aircraft, deaths usually result from overconfidence in bad weather.