Taiwan’s EVA Airways ranked one of top three safest airlines in the world

TAIPEI, Taiwan – EVA Airways, one of Taiwan’s leading international carriers, is the third safest airline in the world, according to the rankings of the Germany-based Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre (JACDEC).

EVA Air rose two notches in the JACDEC 2015 airline safety rankings from a year ago to take third place, trailing only Cathay Pacific Airways and Emirates. EVA Air “has always been among the best in terms of operational safety,” JACDEC said in a statement on its website.

“The overall performance in terms of accident occurrences is even better than Emirates and Cathay.” “But – compared to the other two – the airline lacks substantial numbers of revenue traffic because the fleet is comparably small,” JACDEC said.

In addition, “Eva Air commenced operations in 1991, six years after Emirates and 43 years after Cathay. In consequence, the relationship between traffic and incidents is a little less favourable for the Safety Index,” JACDEC said.

Earlier this month, EVA Air was also named one of the 10 safest airlines in the world for 2015 by AirlineRatings.com. In the JACDEC rankings, Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific replaced Air New Zealand at the top of the 2015 airline safety list, up one notch from a year earlier.

Air New Zealand fell to sixth place this year. JACDEC said that zero fatalities and zero hull loss events for the last three decades as well as a huge amount of accident-free revenue traffic helped Hong Kong’s leading airline take the top position in the rankings.

As for Emirates of the United Arab Emirates, JACDEC said the carrier has never lost an aircraft and has never recorded any fatal accidents since the launch of its operations. The carrier rose two notches from the 2014 safety rankings.

Air Canada took the fourth place, ahead of KLM. After Air New Zealand in sixth, Qantas was ranked the seventh safest airline in the world, followed by Hainan Airlines, JetBlue Airlines, Etihad Airways, All Nippon Airways and Lufthansa.

Meanwhile, due to two major air disasters, Malaysia Airlines fell from 34th to 57th place among the 60 airlines evaluated in the 2015 rankings.