Simon Calder names ‘safest airline in the world’ | Travel News

View airplane ascends into the sky after leaving the runway. The clear blue sky is dotted with white clouds, and an airport is v

Simon Calder has named the ‘safest airline in the world’ (Image: aapsky via Getty Images)

Travel expert Simon Calder has named “the safest airline in the world” — and, contrary to what you might expect, it is not a prestigious long-haul carrier such as British Airways, Emirates or Qantas. In fact, it is one of the UK and Ireland’s most popular budget airlines, transporting 216 million passengers annually on approximately 3,800 flights per day.

Many will recall the iconic scene from Rain Man, the 1988 film starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman, in which the latter reels off the dates and locations of crashes involving several major airlines. When Cruise declares “all airlines have crashed at one time or another”, Hoffman responds: “Qantas never crashed.”

For a number of years following the film’s release, the scene was frequently cited as rankings continued to place Qantas among the world’s safest airlines. However, in 2026, a ranking published by AirlineRatings.com saw Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways claim the top spot as the safest airline in the world for the very first time, with Qantas finishing third.

Yet Calder, who has been dispensing travel wisdom to millions for decades and is widely known as “the man who pays his way”, nominated an airline that does not feature anywhere in the top ten. Speaking to The Telegraph, which he recently joined as a travel expert following many years at The Independent, he said: “It’s a fantastic time to be a traveller. Ryanair, good old Ryanair: safest airline in the world.”

This is not the first time he has made such a claim, reports The Mirror. In 2024, Simon said he wanted to remind people of “the safest airline in the world by a mile”. Once again naming Ryanair, he said: “They didn’t get where they are by flying dangerous planes.”

Ryanair has never suffered a fatal crash, although it has experienced minor incidents, including one in 2024 when one of its aircraft sustained “significant damage” after smashing into an airport fence with 181 passengers on board. The plane was not airborne at the time, but was instead 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 also been other minor incidents involving plane captains becoming unwell and flights having to divert.

What is the safest airline in the world?

While it is indeed the case that Qantas has not experienced a fatal incident since 1951, the airline did suffer several tragedies prior to that date, albeit during a considerably more perilous era for aviation. Commercial pilot Patrick Smith, who runs the Ask The Pilot blog and has previously addressed numerous questions that anxious flyers may wish to have answered, 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.

Airplane on the runway after landing at the airport.

Is there really a safest airline in the world? (Image: undefined)

“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?

Ryanair Boeing 737-800 flying over Barcelona

Ryanair has been named as the ‘world’s safest airline’ by travel expert Simon Calder (Image: Getty)

“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 also argued that this “holds true with respect to budget carriers”, adding: “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.”