Airlines from Nepal, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan bottomed out on a list of the world’s safest carriers.
AirAsia, which recently lost 162 passengers and crew in an Indonesia-to-Singapore journey, also rated poorly on safety ranking made by AirlineRaings.com. The online airline journal evaluated 449 airlines from across the globe.
The airlines were rated on a seven-star system that leaned on accreditation from various international flight bodies. If any airline used exclusively Russian-made equipment, it lost one star automatically.
The worst of the worst were Nepal’s Tara Air and Nepal Airlines, Kazakhstan’s Scat Airlines and Afghanistan’s Kam Air which all received just 1 star.
Amazingly, Malaysia Airlines – which had Flight 370 vanish without a trace in March with 239 people on board – had high safety scores with five stars.
AirAsia subsidiaries in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines didn’t fare well, scoring just two, three and three stars respectively.
There were 149 airlines that scored the max of 7 stars.
Australia’s Qantas, which hasn’t had a fatal crash in the jet era, was named the world’s safest airlines.
Others in the top 10 included, in alphabetical order, Air New Zealand, British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways, Emirates, Etihad Airways, EVA Air, Finnair, Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines.