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Indonesian airlines get bad marks on safety

Deadly crash: Investigators inspect the wreckage of the crashed air force transport plane in Medan, North Sumatra

Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Wed, January 6, 2016

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Indonesian airlines get bad marks on safety

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span class="inline inline-center">Deadly crash: Investigators inspect the wreckage of the crashed air force transport plane in Medan, North Sumatra. The Hercules C-130 plane crashed into a residential neighborhood in the country's third-largest city on June 30. (AP/Binsar Bakkara)

In the latest safety survey by airlineratings.com, Indonesian airlines share the lowest ranking with Nepali and Surinamese airlines by getting awarded just one out of a total of seven stars.

The low-ranked Indonesian airlines included in the survey were Batik Air, Citilink, KalStar Aviation, Lion Air, Sriwijaya Air, Nam Air, TransNusa, Trigana Air, Wings Air and Xpress Air.

A number of fatal incidents occured in 2015, including the crashes of an Air Force Hercules C-130 in Medan in June, of an ATR 42-300 Trigana Air in Papua in August and of an Aviastar DHC-6-300 in October. Previously, AirAsia flight QZ8501 from Surabaya to Singapore crashed in December 2014.

Among all flag carrier airlines in Southeast Asia, Indonesia also lags behind with just three stars for safety, while other countries got from four to the maximum seven stars.

On the list from lowest to highest is Garuda Indonesia (three stars), Lao Airlines (four stars), Thai Airways International (four stars), Malaysia Airlines (five stars), Philippine Airlines (six stars), Myanmar Airways International (six stars), Royal Brunei (six stars), Vietnam Airlines (five stars) and Singapore Airlines (seven stars) .

The survey shows that even though a carrier is low-cost that does not always mean it offers less safety because some low-cost carriers earned seven-star ratings. The 10 safest low-cost carriers in the world are Aer Lingus, Flybe, HK Express, Jetblue, Jetstar Australia, Thomas Cook, TUI Fly, Virgin America, Volaris and Westjet.

In its latest release, Airline Ratings said that unlike a number of other low-cost carriers, these airlines all passed the stringent International Air Transport Association Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) and have excellent safety records.

According to Airline Ratings, 2015 was a disturbing year for airline safety because of the GermanWings and Metrojet cases. "However, according to Aviation-Safety.net data, the 16 accidents in 2015 with 560 fatalities were below the 10-year average of 31 accidents and 714 fatalities. Last year was also a significant improvement over 2014 when there were 21 fatal accidents with 986 fatalities," airlineratings.com's editors said in the article.

The ratings criteria are based on the availability of IOSA or Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) certification, whether the airline is on the European Union (EU) blacklist, if it has maintained a fatality-free record for 10 years, if the airline is endorsed by US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), whether the country of the airline's origin meets all eight ICAO safety parameters, whether the airline's fleet has been grounded by the country's governing aviation safety authority and whether the airline operates only Russian-built aircraft. (bbn)(+)

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