FAQ
Which of two extremely safe flights is actually safer?
Every mainline flight is astonishingly safe. The model puts the safest carriers near 1 in 14 million per flight, which is 99.9999929 percent safe, and the weakest near 1 in 800,000, or 99.999875 percent. For the carriers most people fly, the flight is safer than the drive to the airport.
This site ranks that margin, the only thing left to rank once everything is this safe, and it tells you plainly when the gap is noise. It is for anxious flyers who want the marginally safer option backed by real records, not reassurance.
Aren't all the major airlines basically equally safe?
Largely, yes. The developed world (US, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, the Gulf) flies at the safe end of the model's range, around 1 in 10 to 14 million fatal risk per flight for the strongest carriers. So the score isn't safe versus dangerous, because there's no dangerous option on the board. It ranks the margin between two safe flights and says when that margin is noise. Read it as picking the better of two excellent options, not a warning about either.
What's the difference between an incident and an accident?
An accident means a death, a serious injury, or major damage to the aircraft. An incident is everything below that line: a system fault, a precautionary diversion, a go-around. Incidents stay out of the score, because what one country logs another shrugs off, and you can't rank fairly on a ruler that keeps changing length. We show them for context, linked to source, and never score them.
What do you mean by airline "certifications"?
Three public signals, and no brand or reputation score. IOSA, the IATA Operational Safety Audit: registered carriers run several times lower accident rates. The EU Air Safety List: a regulatory ban, scored as a hard penalty. FAA IASA: it grades a country's regulator, and being based in a Category 2 state, one that falls short of the ICAO oversight standard, costs a carrier a bounded penalty.
Where do the weather and turbulence numbers come from?
Airport weather is NOAA METAR observations, refreshed through the day. The route turbulence outlook is built from NOAA GFS winds at cruise altitude (via Open-Meteo), sampled along your path. It's a model forecast, and we label it as one.
You can't forecast turbulence a week out. Isn't showing it misleading?
You're right, so we don't. Turbulence has a useful horizon of about 36 to 48 hours, and nothing is shown beyond 48 hours from departure. Inside that window it behaves like any weather forecast: worth acting on, not a promise, subject to change. Crews reroute around rough air in real time regardless. Knowing it's likely is enough to pick a seat and keep your belt on.
Don't AIRMETs and SIGMETs just scare anxious people?
Only when they're naked. We show each one with what it covers, how routine it is, and what it means for a large jet whose crew already planned around it, which is usually very little. Raw, an advisory alarms; framed, it informs. A specific you understand beats a blank you fill in yourself.
How do you compare two flights?
Each flight gets an estimated fatal risk. The airline sets the base rate from validated signals (audit status, regulator oversight, recent accident record, flight volume), then empirical-Bayes shrinkage makes a clean record count only once enough flying backs it up. Aircraft type and engine history nudge the number within bounds, because who flies the plane matters far more than which plane. The result is published as odds, 1 in X million, with an uncertainty range. When two flights' trip risks land within about a factor of 1.3, the model calls the gap a coin flip instead of inventing a winner; a larger gap is reported as the edge it is.
Do aircraft age, incident history, or weather really tell me anything about my flight?
Individually, barely, and no model predicts a single flight. The airline dominates; the gap between top carriers is often a coin flip; fleet age and weather are smaller still. We show the records anyway, because the unknown is what feeds anxiety, and a sourced fact (usually a reassuring one) beats an empty space your imagination will fill. Where a factor barely matters, we say so.
Is this just cashing in on anxious people?
Right now there is nothing to cash in with: the whole site is free, Pro included, and nothing is behind a paywall. It does cost real money to run (flight data, weather data, servers), so a paid tier may exist one day, but only once it does something worth paying for, and the records, the ranking, and the calm tools stay free regardless. Also, telling you over and over that flying is extremely safe is a famously poor way to monetize fear.
Are you affiliated with an airline or a regulator?
No. Not with any airline, and not with the NTSB, FAA, ICAO, or NOAA. Everything here is built from their public records, linked back to the originals so you can check the work.
I'm a nervous flyer. Should I even use this?
Depends on you. For most anxious flyers, a concrete record settles the fear better than a blank. For a few, more information just feeds the loop, and refreshing makes it worse; if that's you, close the tab, that's a legitimate use too. If you stay: lean on the free calm tools, read the record once instead of ten times, and notice that every number points the same way. Flying is extremely safe.
A pilot said some of this is wrong. What's your answer?
Good, and keep it coming. Experts catch what I can't, and that feedback has already changed the site: I cut two factors from the score that couldn't be defended, deleted numbers I couldn't source, and capped turbulence at its real 48-hour window. If something's still wrong, tell me, and I'll fix it or show the work.