Thursday, July 31, 1997

Rating airline safety: Should the passengers worry? Most airlines got As

By Tom Belden / Knight-Ridder

If you're worried about how safe it is take an airline flight, a new ranking of the safety record of the industry could make you even more anxious. Whether an airline's ranking "should" make you more nervous about flying is another question.

The Airline Safety Report Card, a service of a travel club in Washington called the Air Travelers Association, recently compiled fatal-crash data on 260 scheduled passenger airlines worldwide. and gave 29 of them a grade of F. Most of the airlines graded, 216, came through with a grade of A.

The rankings were based on the number of fatal accidents an airline had relative to the number of flights it operated from 1987 through 1996. Airlines had to have made at least 20,000 flights in that period to be graded.

Of U.S. carriers, the only one getting a grade of F was ValuJet, which has had one fatal crash in about 3-1/2 years of flying. Most of the others with a failing score operate in Africa, China, India and Latin America.

Some U.S. carriers with two or more fatal crashes in the 10-year period, including Delta, Northwest, United and US Airways, got a grade of A because they've operated millions of flights while ValuJet operated only 151,000 through the end of 1996.

So how useful is this report card have in deciding how safe your next airline flight is going to be? Not much.

That's because even the head of the Air Travelers Association acknowledges that the safety record of an airline can't be used to predict whether that carrier is going to have an accident in the future.

The fact is, fatal accidents on scheduled airlines are so rare that they appear to be almost random events. Around the world, there have been more than 15 million airline flights annually in recent years, and fewer than three dozen accidents that killed or seriously injured passengers.

Most of the crashes occur in developing countries; the chances of a U.S. scheduled airline having a fatal accident are about one in 2 million. Over the last two decades, the worldwide accident rate has remained fairly constant, with the number of crashes rising at about the same pace as the number of flights.

But none of these statistics are much comfort to the legions of white-knuckled travelers, who last year heard countless news reports on the ValuJet and TWA crashes and heard questions about whether the government and the industry do enough to protect passengers.

David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, said he decided to publish the safety report card because people who are about to embark on a flight often ask him: "Am I going to die in a plane crash?"

While the airlines and government agencies can tell you how many flights operated on-time and the number of bags they lost last year, there's no easily obtainable data on safety records, he said.

"People ask for this type of information ... especially people who are traveling abroad," Stempler said. "Nobody can tell you what's going to happen tomorrow. All you can do is look at an airline's history. ... But the information only becomes meaningful when it's looked at with the number of flights an airline's operated.

"I'm not here to change your mind," he added. "I'm just here to give you information."

The Air Travelers Association is a for-profit venture. To order a copy of the Airline Safety Report Card, you have to listen to a sales pitch for a $49.95 one-year membership in the travel club, and agree to sign up for a three-month trial membership for $4.95. The toll-free number is 800-247-7233.