Russia plane crash prompts look at the safest airlines

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Russia: All 71 people on board passenger plane died in crash

Officials say the aircraft disappeared from radar shortly after takeoff.

A Russian passenger plane carrying 71 people crashed Sunday near Moscow, officials said.

“The plane was carrying 65 passengers and six crewmembers. All of them died,” the press service for the Moscow Inter-Regional Transport Prosecutor’s Office told Interfax.

The news of Sunday’s crash involving the Saratov Airlines flight may prompt travelers to take a look at the airlines they use.

Around the world

In January, AirlineRatings.com published what it said were ”its Top 20 safest airlines for 2018 from the 409 it monitors.” All the airlines were listed alphabetically.

Air New Zealand, Alaska Airlines, All Nippon Airways, British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways, Emirates, Etihad Airways, EVA Air, Finnair and Hawaiian Airlines were included.

Also making the top 20 were Japan Airlines, KLM, Lufthansa, Qantas, Royal Jordanian Airlines, Scandinavian Airline System, Singapore Airlines, Swiss, Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Australia.

RUSSIAN PLANE CRASH OUTSIDE MOSCOW LEAVES 71 DEAD

“It is extraordinary that Qantas has been the lead airline in virtually every major operational safety advancement over the past 60 years and has not had a fatality in the jet era,” AirlineRatings.com editor-in-chief Geoffrey Thomas said in a statement.

“But Qantas is not alone. Long established airlines such as Hawaiian and Finnair have perfect records in the jet era,” he added.

AirlineRatings.com said that it looked at multiple components, with Thomas saying that it only examines serious incidents.

“All airlines have incidents every day and many are aircraft manufacture issues, not airline operational problems. And it is the way the flight crew handles incidents that determines a good airline from an unsafe one. So just lumping all incidents together is very misleading,” he said.

Another take

The Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre (JACDEC) last month revealed its 2018 safety rankings, after looking at the 100 biggest carriers.

“All airlines start with a virtual ideal value of 100%,” it explained. “Then every accident or incident, every dead person, every injured person, every benchmark, every audit and every risk reduced this value by a calculated penalty. The more penalty values an airline collects, the lower (or worse) its risk index will be.”

Emirates was in the number-one spot (93.61 percent) on the JACDEC list. Norwegian AS and Virgin Atlantic AW were second and third, respectively.

GRAND CANYON HELICOPTER CRASH KILLS AT LEAST THREE

After that, the rest of the top 20 included KLM, EasyJet, Finnair, Etihad Airways, Spirit Airlines, JetStar Airways, Air Arabia, Cathay Pacific, EL AL, Singapore Airlines, EVA Air, Eurowings, JetBlue Airways, Capital Airlines, Oman Air and Air Canada.

“Again we strongly recommend that the current safety state of each airline is expressed best by the Risk-Index and not by the ranking number,” JACDEC cautioned.

Fox News’ Travis Fedschun and The Associated Press contributed to this report.