No Canadian airlines on new "holistic" safety list

The independent Air Transport Rating Agency of Switzerland has devised what it calls a new scientific "holistic safety rating" for commercial airlines. Unlike the "black list" of dangerous airlines published by the European Union, based almost entirely on accident statistics, the ATRA holistic safety rating is based on multiple criteria. This allows for a more complete safety profile of an airline, rather than the simple one now available, ATRA says.

Any airline not currently on the black list is considered safe, but ATRA believes that the industry needs more detailed information that will contribute to overall flight safety. As an example of how human and mechanical factors can skew an airline's safety profile, ATRA presents two scenarios. In the one, a highly experienced pilot at Airline A can handle a technical emergency on a flight and bring the aircraft down safely. Likewise, an inexperienced pilot at Airline B can handle a routine flight with no technical problems. In either scenario the result would be the same: a "safe" flight. But are the two airlines really equally safe?

The unexpected conjunction of pilot inexperience and technical emergency can lead to disaster, as was shown in the case of the Air France flight that crashed in the Atlantic en route to Paris from South America.

Unfortunately, conjunction of very rare factors can occur with any carrier and one single accident significantly impact company reputations. The innovative approach of the ATRA holistic safety rating takes into account an airline's organizational parameters which contribute to general safety, without being necessarily directly attributed to safety management.

The holistic safety rating computes 15 criteria contributing directly or indirectly to general safety from the top 100 most important airlines. After analyzing the causes of a number of incidents and accidents, ATRA selected 15 organizational criteria, which directly or indirectly contribute to general safety.

Quantitative parameters (such as the average age of the fleet) or qualitative parameters (such as the homogeneity of the fleet) were subjected to a multi-criteria mathematical analysis in order to generate a synthetic indicator and to present a meaningful holistic safety rating.

The criteria used

• 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

From a dataset of the 100 most important airlines, 44 airlines met the inclusion criteria for the multi-criteria analysis.

The top ten airlines 2011 (2009 data) from the holistic safety profiles are (in alphabetic order):

1. Air France-KLM
2. AMR Corporation (American Airlines and American Eagles)
3. British Airways
4. Continental Airlines
5. Delta Airlines
6. Japan Airlines
7. Lufthansa
8. Southwest Airlines
9. United Airlines
10. US Airways.