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Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

> I catch heat every time I mention that air crew training and certification standards are not uniform across the globe and that I am reluctant to fly on many foreign-flag carriers. (However, Emirates and most EU-flag carriers are ones that I would not hesitate to fly on.)

Has anyone made some sort of a rough list of which carriers one can feel safe on?

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This is the list of airlines banned from flying into the EU on safety grounds.

https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/eu-air-safet...

My personal list is Tier 1 US, Canadian, British and German carriers as well as Qantas. Probably throw Air France and KLM in too. In Africa, Ethiopian would be the only airline I would fly if I had to fly an African airline.

I probably would have had a middle eastern airline on the list before I did a project with them last year. After that, I learned a lot that made me stick to the list above.

> I probably would have had a middle eastern airline on the list before I did a project with them last year.

Does this include One World/Star Alliance members?

I honestly don't know enough to have an opinion. I'm personally a fan of Star Alliance, but I don't know enough about the middle eastern airlines.

I DO know that even the airlines in NA/Europe etc. have their own share of... Challenges.. And a lot of those are saved by the regulatory / operating environment / culture, and those safeguards don't necessarily always exist elsewhere in the world.

I've heard Royal Air Maroc is pretty good when it comes to African carriers but I'm not sure. I know they have (or at least used to have) experienced crews and good airframes, but I don't know anything about their maintenance standards

Royal Air Maroc had a senior captain bounce an ATR-72 off the surface of the ocean through pure bad flying in 2018. Literally the belly of the plane scraped the ocean. Basically avoided killing 50 people by a few inches. Wasn’t gonna report it, but the damage gave him away.

Look up air Maroc flight 439

That's wild. Thank you for sharing that with us!

Thanks I looked it up. Very interesting but scary story.

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/madness-in-morocco-the-n...

> I probably would have had a middle eastern airline on the list before I did a project with them last year. After that, I learned a lot that made me stick to the list above.

Are you able to elaborate? My email address is in my profile if you want to share in private.

Sure, in vague terms, there is a giant cultural problem in the Middle East where locals don't have the education or training or (more importantly) drive to actually do work, so most good employees are expats, but almost all leadership is locals because of hiring rules and nepotism.

Companies are actively trying to change it, but they aren't there yet and it's an uphill battle that has to start basically at the kindergarten level.

That culture also drives a major "image" focus, where how things look is more important that how things actually operate. I'm not from the Middle East, but this is what was communicated to us by our client / locals we interviewed.

In Africa, South African Airlines also has an exemplary safety record.

Air France dropped of my list of airlines to fly on after AF447.

I’m probably going to get downvoted for this, but focus on large, legacy airlines based in countries that have a long safety record (not just in terms of crashes, but also just general approach to safety).

I agree. I would nominate Delta Airlines, British Airways and Lufthansa to be the top safest carriers in the world.

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