Simon Calder names ‘safest airline in the world’ — not Qantas or British Airways

Travel expert Simon Calder has named “the safest airline in the world” — and, contrary to what you might assume, it’s not a prestigious long-haul airline like British Airways, Emirates or Qantas. In fact, it’s one of the UK and Ireland’s most popular budget airlines, carrying 216 million passengers a year on around 3,800 daily flights.

Many will remember the iconic scene from Rain Man, the 1988 film starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman, in which the latter names the dates and places of crashes involving several major airlines. When Cruise says “all airlines have crashed at one time or another”, Hoffman replies: “Qantas never crashed.”

For several years afterwards, the scene was cited as rankings continued to suggest that Qantas remained the world’s safest airline. Although in 2026,. in a ranking published by AirlineRatings.com, Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways claimed the top spot as the safest airline in the world for the first time. Qantas was third, behind Cathay Pacific in second.

But Calder, who has been dispensing travel advice to millions for decades and is known as “the man who pays his way” named an airline that doesn’t feature at all in the top 10. In an interview with The Telegraph, which he has recently joined as a travel expert after years at The Independent, he said: “It’s a fantastic time to be a traveller. Ryanair, good old Ryanair: safest airline in the world.”

It’s a statement he has made before. In 2024, Simon said he wanted to remind people of “the safest airline in the world by a mile”. Again naming Ryanair, he said: “And they only fly Boeing 737s so there we are. They didn’t get where they are by flying dangerous planes.”

Ryanair has had no fatal crashes, though it has had minor incidents, including in 2024 when one of its aircraft suffered “significant damage” when it smashed into an airport fence with 181 passengers onboard. However, it was not flying but was in fact being pulled by a tug into a runway departure slot by a driving instructor who was advising a trainee at London Stansted Airport and there were no injuries. There have been other minor incidents involving plane captains becoming unwell and flights having to divert.

While it is true that Qantas has not had a fatal incident since 1951, it did have several before then, albeit in a far more dangerous period for air travel. Commercial pilot Patrick Smith, who runs the Ask The Pilot blog and has previously answered several questions nervous flyers might want to know the answer to, said: “Isn’t it true that Qantas, the Australian airline, has never suffered a fatal accident? That’s the myth, perpetuated far and wide — and which, no surprise, Qantas doesn’t exactly rush to dispel. Let the record show, however, that the history of Qantas is scarred by at least seven fatal incidents. All of these, to be fair, took place prior to 1951, and the carrier has been perfect ever since. So while the details aren’t quite right, the gist of the Qantas legend stands: its record is an outstanding one.

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“And so if Qantas isn’t the safest airline, which is? That’s a question I’m hit with all the time. I do not have an answer because there isn’t one. Considering just how rare crashes are, such comparisons are little more than an academic exercise. The nervous flyer’s tendency is to make distinctions in an abstract, purely statistical sense rather than a practical one. But these distinctions aren’t particularly meaningful when a small handful of incidents is spread over thousands or even millions of departures… why drive yourself crazy poring over the fractions of a percentage that differentiate one carrier’s fatality rates from another?

“Really, is airline A, with one crash in 20 years, a safer bet than airline B, with two crashes over that same span? If you feel more comfortable picking United over Aeroflot, or Lufthansa over China Airlines, go for it. Will you actually be safer? Maybe, when hashed out to the third decimal place, but for all reasonable intents and purposes, they’re the same. Price, schedule, and service are the only criteria you really need to bother with.”

Patrick said this also “holds true with respect to budget carriers”. He said: “There is longstanding suspicion that young, competitively aggressive airlines are apt to cut corners. It’s an assertion that while it feels like it makes sense, it isn’t bolstered by the record. In the United States, a twenty-five-year lookback… reveals only a handful of fatal crashes and an overall accident rate in proportion to market share.”

This list was published in 2026 by AirlineRatings.com.

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1. Etihad
2. Cathay Pacific
3. Qantas
4. Qatar
5. Emirates
6. Air New Zealand
7. Singapore Airlines
8. EVA Air
9. Virgin Australia
10. Korean Air