The Safest Airlines to Fly On

There's no accounting for terrible fate and random events, but The Daily Beast wants you to see how major and regional airlines rank in accidents and incidents. It's worth a peek before booking your next flight.

Rudy Maxa ranked, charted, and broke down data from 10 major air carriers using data from, which itself pulls data regularly from the Federal Aviation Administration, National Transportation Safety Board, and the U.S. Department of Transportation. Then he did the same for about 25 prominent regional carriers, the smaller airlines usually contracted by the bigger guys to connect passengers between smaller cities.

Maxa's charts reveal some interesting factoids—like how passengers seated near a plane's tail are 40 percent more likely to survive a crash than those in the first few rows. More interesting, or perhaps disheartening, are the statistics on regional operators:

[Regional carriers have] an accidents and incidents rate more than twice as high as the national carriers. "In the industry, one of the biggest concerns are the regional operators," says Jim Asker, the managing editor of the trade magazine Aviation Week. Among those The Daily Beast measured, several smaller airlines had perfect safety records, while Midwest (based in Milwaukee and now a subsidiary of Republic Airlines, which has won an auction to acquire Frontier Airlines) had the worst.

Hit the link for a full helping of charts and analysis, and tell us what safety factors you consider when you're arranging air travel in the comments.