Qantas is the safest airline in the world for 2019

Australian flag carrier followed by Alaska Airlines and All Nippon Airways in Airlineratings.com ranking

The Australian flag carrier, Qantas, has been named the safest airline in the world for 2019.

It was followed by Alaska Airlines and All Nippon Airways in the analysis carried out by Airlineratings.com, with American Airlines and Austrian Airlines filling out the top five.

Airlineratings.com examine a range of metrics to determine the safest airline each year.

These include audits from aviation’s governing and industry bodies, fleet age, crash and serious incident reports, and profitability. It sources data from 405 different airlines.

The editors at Airlineratings.com also determined the 20 safest low-cost airlines for 2019, with Flybe, Frontier and HK Express taking the top spots.

The least safe airlines in the world are Ariana Afghan Airlines, Blue Wing Airlines, Kam Air and Trigana Air Service.

Qantas is the oldest-serving carrier in the world and has a near exemplary record across its 98-year history. Airlineratings.com specifically picked it out for its comprehensive operations and safety.

AirlineRatings.com editor-in-chief Geoffrey Thomas said: “All airlines have incidents every day and many are aircraft manufacture issues, not airline operational problems.”

“It is the way the flight crew handles incidents that determines a good airline from an unsafe one.”

The site, which delivers expert safety ratings for more than 435 airlines around the world, says that Qantas has been a world leader in developing new safety systems that allows the carrier to detect problems before they become safety issues.