Have Your Say

Chris of Vietnam

December 28, 2015

I am interested to know why you exclude “pilot suicides” with regard to whether an airline has had a fatality free 10 year period for the 7 year star safety rating.

This is probably a factor that raises the MOST alarm bells to me. Human Factors and Performance and The culture within any aviation companyare probably the most significant of making an airline safe, The fact that that there airlines where people cant talk freely about issues without fear of loosing their job is a major SAFETY CONCERN.

I urge airline ratings to remove the 7 star rating from ANY airline that has suffered fatalities due to us pilot suicide. Stress in this industry is a major cause of accidents and how airlines monitor and deal with flight crew human performance is REALLY a major factor in safety.

Editors' Comment

Whilst we appreciate what you are saying, this is just too much of a subjective, non predictable and non measurable criteria for us to rate on. Lufthansa have some of best screening of which Germanwings was a part and they noticed nothing. Other airlines have no screening at all and they've never had a pilot suicide. Our ratings are about looking at the safety of future flights therefore all our measures look at the impacts on day to day safety. Measuring the mental state of every airlines pilots is impossible and it's also private information that none of us are privy to.