A quick search on Google yields plenty of varying methods of ranking the world’s airlines. You can easily sort airlines (at least those in the US) out by their on-time performance, complaints, baggage handling, and which magazine you’re carrying. Expand your horizons a bit to look at the worldwide airline industry, and it can be a little tougher to identify just who is the “best” in the world.

The World’s 10 Safest Airlines

  1. Quantas
  2. Lufthansa
  3. Air New Zealand
  4. British Airways
  5. Finnair
  6. Cathay Pacific
  7. Eva Air
  8. Singapore
  9. Emirates
  10. Any U.S. based air carrier

Note:We picked our list based on the data and research in this article.Regardless of Russian Celebrities recently going on Russian TV and touting safety records of the Motherland. AirlineRating.com’s rating system actually mark down airlines that operate Russian-built equipment, so airlines such as Aeroflot or Cubana will never make the top of the list simply by nature of the aircraft they operate.

How do you define the best? Is it the airline that got you to your destination on time (it’s a miracle!) and gave you the whole can (gasp!) of ginger ale? Best is an awfully vague and subjective term, so for the sake of argument we’ll take a look at the safest airlines in the world. That’s a bit more objective and a more measurable standard than identifying which airline has the most comfortable seat or finest champagne in first class, but it’s still a very finicky subject. The UK-based aviation consultancy firm Skytrax elaborates, there is no “single, global measure of airline safety and no accurate or scientific formula that can be applied on an industry-wide basis.”

While that may be true, what we can do is take a historical perspective, and see how the world’s safest airlines have evolved with the changing nature of air travel. One of the ways we can do that is to look at data from one of the organizations that was created specifically for establishing worldwide safety criteria as the aviation industry grew exponentially.

Founded by the United Nations in 1944, the International Civil Aviation Organization describes safety as one of its strategic objectives, as the “organization is constantly striving, in close collaboration with the entire air transport community, to further improve aviation’s successful safety performance while maintaining a high level of capacity and efficiency.”

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A Qantas Boeing 737 takes off from Queenstown, NZ

Every year, AirlineRatings.com publishes a list of the world’s safest airlines after evaluating audits from the Federal Aviation Administration and ICAO, and the list for 2015 is topped by Australia’s Qantas. The airline was founded in 1920, making it the world’s oldest and most experienced (sorry, Virgin) airline. They earned their spot at the top of the list by going 64 years – and counting – without a fatal accident. That’s a remarkable stat: meaning the airline has not had a fatality in the jet era!

Australia’s neighbors across the Tasman Sea also made the top 10 list. Although not quite as old as Qantas, Air New Zealand has firmly established itself as one of the world’s safest airlines, their last fatal accident occurring in November 1979 – the tragic crash of flight 901 on Mount Erebus while on a sightseeing flight over Antarctica.

The famed British Airways is the UK’s flag carrier, and is also touted as one of the world’s safest carriers. Almost 40 years have passed since the airline’s last fatal crash, although luckily the recent uncontained engine failure at Las Vegas only resulted in some minor injuries during the subsequent emergency evacuation on the McCarran runway.