Nervous fliers, take note: AirlineRatings.com has just released its annual ranking of the world’s safest airlines, and this year, according to Conde Nast Traveler, Etihad Airways—the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, which came in fifth in 2025—nabbed the top spot for the first time ever.
How the Airlines Are Ranked
To rank the 320 airlines it monitors, Airline Ratings looks at factors like incident rates adjusted for number of flights, age of the airline fleet, pilot training, and international audits of safety. According to CEO Sharon Petersen, they made one big change for 2026: “We are placing a greater emphasis on turbulence prevention, as it remains the leading cause of in-flight injuries,” she said in a press release. Airline Ratings performs an onboard safety audit to assess for that factor, and also looks at whether or not an airline uses the International Air Transport Association (IATA) Turbulence Aware platform (or a similar service).
How the Airlines Fared
When assessed for those factors, the differences between the airlines was minimal. “Less than four points covered positions one through 14, and at the very top the margins were even tighter, with just 1.3 points separating positions one through six in the full service category,” Petersen said.
Because the differences were so narrow, Petersen posited that Airline Ratings might need to tweak their rankings by “where grouping airlines into performance tiers [to provide] a more accurate reflection of reality. All airlines in the Top 25 are world leaders in aviation safety, and claims that one is significantly safer or less safe than another are both sensationalist and false.”
Petersen also noted that every single airline on the list had a recorded incident—think things like tail strikes and engine shutdowns. But that’s not cause for alarm: “The actual incident rate per flight sits between 0.002 and 0.09 across the airlines,” she said, “which is a true credit to the industry as a whole.”
2026’s Top 25 Full-Service Airlines
Etihad’s position at the top of the list marks “a Gulf carrier has taken the number one spot,” Petersen said. The airline’s young fleet of planes and its crash-free history contributed to the ranking, as did improvements in safety related to turbulence. Etihad also had “the lowest incident rate per flight of any airline on the list.”
Air New Zealand, which took the top spot in 2025, is number six on the list this year. Singapore Airlines was reinstated after being removed from the list in 2025 after an incident related to turbulence. STARLUX and Fiji Airways are both making their debuts on the list, which you can see in full below.
- Etihad
- Cathay Pacific
- Qantas
- Qatar
- Emirates
- Air New Zealand
- Singapore Airlines
- EVA Air
- Virgin Australia
- Korean Air
- STARLUX
- Turkish Airlines
- Virgin Atlantic
- ANA
- Alaska Airlines
- TAP Air Portugal
- SAS
- British Airways
- Vietnam Airlines
- Iberia
- Lufthansa
- Air Canada
- Delta2
- American Airlines3
- Fiji Airways
2026’s Top 25 Safest Low-Cost Airlines
Airline Ratings didn’t stop at ranking full-service airlines; they also looked at low-cost airlines for safety.
- HK Express
- Jetstar Airways
- Scoot
- flydubai
- EasyJet Group
- Southwest
- airBaltic
- VietJet Air
- Wizz Air Group
- AirAsia Group4
- TUI UK
- Vueling
- Norwegian
- JetBlue
- FlyNAS
- Cebu Pacific
- Jet2
- Ryanair Ireland and UK5
- Spring Airlines China
- Transavia Group
- Eurowings Group
- Volaris6
- WestJet Group
- GOL
- SKY Airline Chile
It can be tempting to freak out when a severe bout of turbulence jostles your plane, or reports of aviation incidents hit the news—but as pilot and professor Dan Bubb told the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 2025, airplanes remain the safest mode of transportation. “This not only is proven statistically, but also in reality given the infrequency of aircraft accidents,” Bubb said. “In the U.S., the last fatal commercial plane crash before the American Airlines regional jet that crashed earlier this year near Reagan Airport was in 2009. We went 16 years without any fatalities, which is pretty remarkable given how many thousands of flights take place each day.”
