Ranking America's Safest Airlines Is a Silly Exercise

(MoneyWatch)  Another day, another downright silly airline ranking. This time, it's a ranking showing America's safest airline, courtesy of US News. It's a good thing US News stopped publishing its print edition, because this isn't worth the paper it would have been printed on. All of America's airlines are safe and this just fabricates a forced ranking that means nothing.

According to the report, the idea was to take all of the incidents that occurred in 2010 "where the airlines were at fault" and then rank every airline by percentage of incidents per flight.

What you end up with is an incredibly tiny number for every airline. To call one safer than the others based on this raw data is completely misleading. JetBlue is apparently the least safe with 0.0000776 incidents per flight while AirTran is tops with 0.0000196 incidents per flight. Huge difference, right?

This, of course, assumes that the author correctly separated out the incidents that were the "fault" of the airlines. The report explains it this way:

It's not really fair to blame an airline when the incident is the result of a bird collision (33 of them last year, sometimes leading to more damage than you'd think), an unruly passenger (36 cases) or a medical emergency (31 incidents). There were also several episodes of turbulence leading to injuries, and even five instances where a flight was struck by lightning.

This, um, raises questions. Some airlines are known to be more conservative when it comes to flying in and around weather. So it might be airline-related when one airline has more lightning strikes or turbulence injuries. But you'll never be able to pull that info out, and really, the numbers are so small it shouldn't matter that much anyway.

More important, some of the incidents that are listed here as being the fault of the airline may not be so. Years ago, an Air France Concorde crashed on takeoff from Paris. Does that make Air France unsafe? French courts later decided (controversially) that the accident was caused by Continental because a piece fell off a Continental airplane that departed before the Concorde and that helped bring down the airplane. But with this simple methodology, Air France would be shown as being "at fault."

Does this exercise tell us anything? Sure -- it says the air travel is really, really safe in the US. No shocker there. But trying to rank the airlines based on a handful of incidents is just silly. I realize that people only read US News these days when a ranking is involved (colleges, for example), but that doesn't mean it's time to go and rank everything. It's just not a good way to look at a very serious subject.

Related:

• Delta Brings Back Aviation Safety Action Program; American Pilots Chime In
• American Flight Attendants Begin Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP)
• Regulators Gone Wild: FAA Fines Frontier $380K for Safety Card Glitch

Photo via Flickr user I Don't Know, Maybe./CC 2.0