The 29 safest airlines?

First things first: Contrary to what has been reported ad nausaeum, the aircraft that crashed in Mali last week was not the property of Air Algerie, the national airline of Algeria. The MD-83 airplane was owned and flown by a Spanish contractor called Swiftair, on behalf of Air Algerie. This was a Spanish-registered aircraft staffed by Spanish crew, and not an “African airline,” as virtually every commentator and correspondent has erroneously described it.

Regardless, this was the third high-profile accident in less than ten days’ time, joining the MH17 catastrophe and the crash of an ATR turboprop in Taiwan. An awful week to be sure, with more than four hundred casualties. Plane crashes, like tropical storms and celebrity deaths, seem to happen in threes sometimes.

The temptation, understandably, is to link these recent incidents together and try to wring some scary significance out of them. The media is playing it like some aviation Armegeddon, making travelers everywhere nervous. What in the world is happening? What does such a terrible streak portend? What does it mean for the greater context of air safety?

Well, probably not much.

For starters, these were very different accidents in very different parts of the world, occurring under very different circumstances. And partly because air crashes have become so rare, we tend to fixate on them when they do happen, which messes with our perspective. Full story...

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