A list of the most dangerous airlines in the world has been released and while AirAsia Indonesia is included, Malaysia Airlines is not.
The Malaysian carrier scored five out of a possible seven stars for its safety record, as opposed to five airlines which just manage one star.
Three AirAsia subsidiaries – in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines – were included on the list, scoring just two, three and three stars respectively.
Indonesia’s AirAsia Flight QZ8501 crashed into the Java Sea on December 28, killing all 162 people on board.
Nepal Airlines and Tara Air both came bottom in a report by Australian review site AirlineRatings.com, earning just one star for safety.
The two companies were featured alongside Afghan airline Kam Air, SCAT Airlines in Kazakhstan and Lion Air in Indonesia.
The site reveals that out of the 449 airlines studied, all five airlines received one star or less in the website’s seven-star safety ranking.
There were 149 airlines which achieved seven-stars while 58 scored six stars and almost 41 had just three stars or less.
All five of the most dangerous airlines listed are banned in the European Union Member States and ‘strongly advised against’ in the United States.
For all its problems with two tragic flights in 2014, Malaysia Airlines earned five out of seven stars.
The airline was involved in two major crashes last year when Flight MH370 went missing in March 2014 carrying 239 people.
That plane is still missing without a trace. The flight is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean. In July 2014, MH17 was hit by a missile as they it was flying over the Ukraine during its battle with Russia. It killed 298 people on-board.
In comparison, the airlines that received just one star have experienced a high number of accidents.
In 2005 Kam Air Flight 904 travelling from Herat International Airport in western Afghanistan, vanished from radar screens on approach to Kabul International Airport in poor weather.
The disappearance sparked a massive ANA search operation for the 96 passengers and eight crew. The wreckage of the plane was found on 5 February 2005 in the mountains east of Kabul.
In 2010, 22 people were killed when a Tara Air flight crashed shortly after take-off from Lamidanda Airport in Nepal, while earlier this year Nepal Airlines Flight 183 crashed on its way to Arghakhanchi.
In January 2013, all 21 people on board SCAT Airlines flight from Kokshetau to Almaty died when the aircraft crashed in poor weather near Kyzyltu.
AirlineRatings.com, the world’s only safety and product rating website, which was launched in June 2013.
The website, a joint initiative between The West Australian and Aerospace Technical Publications International, said its rating system is based on audits from the industry’s governing bodies and governments, plus an airline’s fatality record.
But the study is overshadowed by an awful 12 months for airline safety with some of the most tragic and bizarre incidents in modern history, as the report points out.
There were 21 fatal accidents last year – a record low at one for every 1.3 million flights – but the 986 fatalities were higher than the 10-year average largely due to two unprecedented tragedies involving Malaysia Airlines, which accounted for 537 deaths.
Despite those high-profile incidents – plus last month’s deadly crash of AirAsia flight QZ8501 – the report insists air travel is the safest method of transportation.
The world’s airlines carried a record 3.3 billion passengers on 27 million flights.
Fifty years ago there were a staggering 87 crashes, killing 1,597 people, when airlines carried only 141 million passengers – five per cent of today’s total, the report says.
The website has also announced its top ten safest airlines and top ten safest low cost airlines.
It named Australia’s national airline as the safest on the planet.
With a ‘fatality free record’ in the jet era, Qantas scored top marks out of nearly 450 carriers monitored by aviation safety review website.
The Australian-based website ranked the rest of its top ten in alphabetical order, with British Airways, Gulf carriers Emirates and Etihad Airways, and Lufthansa finding a place on the list.