5 Airlines With The Most Safety Problems According To JACDEC

Editor's Note: As noted in our story, the JACDEC listing covers only 60 airlines. Because there are over 300 airlines, and additional reporting revealed that some of the JACDEC data for some airlines is not consistent with the National Transportation Safety Board data, we have concluded that the best course of action was to shorten the list we posted. We regret any confusion this may have caused.

Flying was less deadly in 2012 than in any year since 1945, but that does not mean all airlines are equally safe.

The Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre (JACDEC), which collects information about aviation accidents and safety, has published its annual Airline Safety Ranking.

The ratings take into account the number and deadliness of hull loss accidents and serious incidents in the last 30 years of operation in relation to passenger miles flown. The ratings also take into account international safety benchmarks such as the IOSA Audit and the USOAP country factor, along with a time factor which increases the effect of recent accidents.

The results do not account for the cause of hull losses or whether the airline is at fault, so they are an imperfect measure of safety.

(Read further methodological notes at JACDEC >)

Of 60 ranked airlines, here are the five with the worst safety records, including the number of hull losses and passenger deaths in these accidents since 1983:

#5 Korean Air: 9 hull losses; 687 dead

#4 GOL Transportes Aéreos: 1 hull loss; 154 dead

#3 Air India: 3 hull losses; 329 dead

#2 TAM Airlines: 6 hull losses; 336 dead

#1 China Airlines: 8 hull losses; 755 dead