eddie007

What I want to know is have all the uk airports been closed yet?

Beoz

That's a given ..... Leaves on the runway .... Snow on the tracks.... There's no doubt

Japonica

Maybe they put all their customer service staff into safety duty. I lodged a complaint a month ago and got the standard "we'll get back to you within 14 days" and haven't heard from them yet.

Bernieboy

I dated a finnish girl for years,i loved Finnair,all the crew were alkies n made sure you were pissed by the time ya landed in Helsinki

bcworld

I see Chris's angry mob is in full swing again!

It's a reasonable enough topic for discussion...because it's often stated that QF is the safest airline...something to do with Rainman...but statistically some other airlines do have a lower rate of incidents. QF is of course still a very safe airline to fly with.

bcworld

I lived with Finns at Uni...they were all alkies too!

Beoz

Reasonable enough had the usual, tiresome dig at something Australian not appeared in the first post.

eddie007

Have you heard of Michael Fish at all? You DO realize that a QF plane is going to drop out of the sky any minute now....

bcworld

Mentioning 2 Australian airlines among the world's safest is a dig?

Bernieboy

Mate,i never arrived in Helsinki sober,ever

Beoz

In the way it was phased, of course it was a dig. When he wakes up in the morning and finds 2 pages devoted to this crap, he'll be oh so delighted.

bcworld

It's pretty much the same way it was phrased in the Aus media this week...Qantas doesn't make the top 10 etc.

Leaving the Chris stalking aside and back on topic...it's called the Reindeer route and they market it as one of the fastest routes to Europe...short connections in Helsinki & easy to transit.

slapphead_otool

Quite correct. Except the two guys who run the web site are not statisticians.

Analysing accidents is one thing (which is what they do, and they write books about the accidents, rather like those late night "Aircraft Accident" TV shows).

Actually predicting safety is far far harder.

Its not simply recorded incidents v flying hours.

To do it correctly you would have to weight numbers of take offs and landings, flying hours, passenger hours, weather conditions, number of airports landed at, safety at those airports etc.

The survey was far too simplistic. It appeals to "anoraks" who love such things but dont really understand the science behind predictive analytics.

A friend of mine did analytics of doctors. Some had shocking records. Almost all of their patents died. Shocking. How could they be allowed to practice.

They were in palliative care.

Amazulu

SIA are a great airline but have had some horrific accidents. I have no problem flying them though.

slapphead_otool

And to demonstrate how simplistic statistics can be very wrong:

We are always told that flying is 12 times safer than catching the train and 60 times safer than using a car.

But air travel is only the safest mode of transport when fatalities are calculated in terms of distance travelled.

If deaths are counted per unit of time travelled, a plane is as safe as a train!

And if fatalities are computed in terms of the number of journeys taken, cars and trains are respectively three times and six times safer than planes!!

Take a read of this for more interesting statistics:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babba.../01/air-safety