What advice would you give to air travellers looking for the safest airline?
To find the safest possible airline is to look for a seven-star airline. The general public knows the very high-profile airlines are just a byword for excellence. My tip is to stay with them. We know their airfares are probably a little more expensive than some of the other options, but then it's time possibly to say 'well maybe I need to spend an extra $50 or $100 on my airfare'. Airfares are very cheap as it is, but maybe it's time to spend a little bit more money.
Do recent events tell us we should avoid budget air travel?
No. The Air Asia disaster was on a budget airline but Malaysia Airlines was a seven-star airline before those two disasters. The two disasters that have befallen Malaysian: MH370 - the jury is out on what happened - MH17, there was a Singapore Airlines airplane behind it and an Air India airplane in front of it. It could have been either of those two that went down and so that was an extraordinary stroke of bad luck. TransAsia is a regional carrier, so it doesn't really fit into either category.
"Budget airlines today are usually very good operations"
Twenty years ago [budget airlines] used second-hand airplanes and there were question marks about whether you should travel on them or not. These days a typical low-cost airline buys brand new airplanes and is a very slick operation.
Are certain parts of the world more risky to fly into?
Absolutely. You've got areas in Africa for instance - poorer countries - with bad infrastructure. Flying in an airplane is not just the airplane, not just the airline. It can be the landing aides, it can be the runways. Are the runways grooved for wet weather? How long are the runways? Are they short? Are there mountains all around it? Is the weather bad? So when you add in runway length, infrastructure, landing aides, mountains, weather, when you start adding those factors together.
"You may see a small airline and think they probably wouldn’t be very good at training but what they probably do is they sub-contract their training to someone like Boeing."
If you’re flying for instance to Nepal, then there is a much, much higher risk, because the weather is quite often very bad, very mountainous, the runways are perched on the side of mountains. It’s about as risky as you can get. For instance a country like Indonesia, a recent ICAO audit of the country found it's below average on every single parameter. The average compliance with international standards is about 30 per cent. There is serious concern about the country's ability to oversee its aviation infrastructure and airlines. The runways there are typically shorter, lots of mountains, bad weather; a much higher risk.
What are the safer parts of the world to fly into?
The United States is very safe, Europe’s very safe, Australia and New Zealand are very safe. Somewhere like Singapore is extremely safe and China today is becoming a standout. Their compliance with an ICAO audit is almost 100 per cent. It's the second biggest travel market in the world. Whereas 20 years ago you heard about planes crashing quite often, now it has an almost blemish-free record over the last 10 years. They have a very well disciplined, well-structured airline system, which works very well.
What advice would you give people who want to travel the world on a shoestring budget?
If you go onto our website and look at the safety ratings, that's a good start. And if you want to delve deeper there's a great aviation website called Aviation Safety Network. It has the crash records of every airline in the world. Click on the airline you’re going to fly with and you’ll get a more forensic look at how many crashes they have had or have not had. There's also a website called Planespotters and you can actually look at the fleet age of an airline. If they’re flying airliners that are 25-30 years old you should stay away from them, for example.
Do training procedures differ from airline to airline and is that something we should be mindful of?
They do and it's something that is very difficult to put your finger on. There are some areas in safety that are very difficult, because they do vary and you may see a small airline and think they probably wouldn’t be very good at training but what they probably do is they sub-contract their training to someone like Boeing for instance. So it's hard to track exactly what an airline does or does not do. As a general rule, your more high-profile airlines like The Qantas' and the Air New Zealands have more resources in the training field.
"Last year was one of the lowest years ever for fatal crashes"
There is a problem in the industry and that’s the shortage of pilots. And over the next 20 years they're forecasting we need another half a million pilots for the industry to handle expansion and there are serious concerns in the industry that we're not going to get the right caliber of pilots over the next 20 years. And one of the issues is that pilot salaries have been degraded so much across the globe because of this drive for low-cost airlines that it’s not an attractive career as it used to be.
Is this information readily available to people looking to know more?
[Our] website came up because this information was not freely available and was open to misinterpretation. Because, for instance, some people suggested incidents are good indications of an airline’s safety. Well that’s a very subjective situation and Qantas, for instance, had two very serious incidents over the past four years with the QF32 out of Singapore and the QF72 off the coast of Australia. Very serious incidents however neither of them had anything to do with Qantas at all. They were systems failures by Rolls Royce and a system failure by Northrop Grumman that built computers. But the Qantas pilots saved both airplanes. Therefore although they had an incident, it was the pilot’s skill that saved the day, therefore one would up-rate Qantas on that basis not downgrade them on those incidents and how they’re interpreted.
Absolutely. I think it’s really good. It has its limitations like all systems and it won’t guarantee your safety but yes, the more information and the easier it is to access, the better.
What do you say to people who are worried about their safety in light of recent events. Is it safe to fly?
Not to make light of the terrible tragedies of last year, there are a couple of things to point out. First off, last year was one of the lowest year ever for fatal crashes. We had 21 fatal crashes last year and 950 people, approximately, lost their lives. If we go back 50 years to when jets were first introduced to Australia, there were 87,000 crashes and 1,500 people lost their lives. But the world’s aviation industry only carried 141 million people. So 141 million people traveled by air 50 years ago. Last year, 3.5 billion people travelled by air. It's incredibly safe.
