Lufthansa made the AirlineRatings.com list of the “World’s Safest Airlines for 2015.” It is a sign that even carriers with impeccable records can suffer a tragic accident like the one in which a Lufthansa-operated Germanwings Airbus A320 crashed in France, killing 150 people.

The AirlineRatings.com list includes nine other carriers:

Top of the list again is Qantas which has a fatality free record in the jet era. Making up the remainder of the top ten in alphabetical order are: Air New Zealand, British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways, , Emirates, Etihad Airways, EVA Air, Finnair, Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines.

Fortunately for flyers, airline safety has improved sharply over most of the past 50 years:

There is no doubt 2014 was a bad year for airline safety with some of the most tragic and bizarre incidents in modern history but the numbers can be deceiving.

Certainly 21 fatal accidents with 986 fatalities — higher than the 10-year average — is sickening. However, the world’s airlines carried a record 3.3 billion passengers on 27 million flights.

Flashback 50 years and there were a staggering 87 crashes killing 1,597 when airlines carried only 141 million passengers — 5 per cent of today’s number.

Methodology: AirlineRatings.com’s rating system takes into account a range of factors related to audits from aviation’s governing bodies such as the FAA and ICAO, as well as government audits and an airline’s fatality record.

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