Austrian Airlines safety record
No fatal accident for anyone on board an Austrian Airlines flight since 1960 — more than sixty-five years. On airlines like Austrian, the chance of being in a fatal accident is about 1 in 80 million per flight.
No fatal accident for anyone on board since 1960
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One fatal accident, more than sixty-five years ago
Austrian Airlines' only fatal accident was on 26 September 1960, two and a half years after its first flight. Flight 901, a Vickers Viscount from Vienna via Warsaw, hit trees 11 km short of the runway at Moscow-Sheremetyevo on a night approach; 31 of the 37 people on board lost their lives. Investigators found nothing wrong with the aircraft and pointed to how its height had been measured — a faulty altimeter, a wrong setting or a misreading — but the instruments were too badly damaged to say which.
No Austrian flight has had a fatal accident since, including those flown as Austrian by its former regional airline Tyrolean. In January 2004 a Fokker 70 from Vienna lost the thrust of both engines to icing on its approach to Munich and was landed in a snowy field short of the runway; all 32 on board got out, three with minor injuries. In June 2024 an A320 from Palma flew into a hailstorm on its descent towards Vienna: the hail badly damaged the nose cone and both cockpit windscreens and knocked out the airspeed readings, and the crew landed safely; no one on board was hurt. Germany's accident investigators (BFU) took over that investigation in 2025 and expect to publish their final report at the end of 2026 at the earliest.
Two airlines that later became part of Austrian had fatal accidents years before Austrian owned them: Lauda Air, whose flight 004 crashed in Thailand in 1991, and the regional airline Rheintalflug, whose aircraft went into Lake Constance in 1989. They are merger predecessors and are not counted here.
Austrian flies from Vienna with Airbus A320-family jets, Embraer 195s and Boeing 767, 777 and 787 long-haul aircraft, and carried 15 million passengers in 2025. It has been part of the Lufthansa Group since 2009 and is an IATA member.
Nothing to put on the line
Every fatal accident since 1970 would be a dot on this line. Austrian Airlines has none: its only fatal accident was in 1960.
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The day you fly, in the departure airport's own calendar.
Austrian Airlines in numbers
What Austrian Airlines flies
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Austrian Airlines flights, with their turbulence forecast
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Austrian Airlines safety questions
How safe is Austrian Airlines?
No fatal accident for anyone on board an Austrian Airlines flight since 1960 — more than sixty-five years. On airlines like Austrian, the chance of being in a fatal accident is about 1 in 80 million per flight. Every fact on this page is sourced — the list is at the bottom.
What is Austrian Airlines' safety rating?
FlyBud doesn't invent a score. What matters is the record, which you can check: one fatal accident, in 1960, and none since. It is a member of IATA, the airlines' trade body, which requires its members to pass IATA's operational safety audit (IOSA).
Has Austrian Airlines ever crashed?
Once with fatalities: flight 901 near Moscow in 1960. Since then its most serious events ended with everyone safe — a Fokker 70 that lost engine power to icing and landed in a field near Munich in 2004, and an A320 badly damaged by hail near Vienna in 2024. The Lauda Air crash of 1991 happened before Lauda was part of Austrian.
Where these facts come from
Every fact on this page is from official accident reports, the airline's own filings or the published accident record.
- Aviation Safety Network Flight 901, 1960
- Wikipedia founding, accident list, subsidiaries
- BFU (German investigators), via SKYbrary Flight 111 near Munich, 2004
- aeroTELEGRAPH (BFU interim status) Flight 434 hail, 2024
- Wikipedia Lauda Air ownership and flight 004
- Aviation Safety Network Rheintalflug 102, 1989
- Lufthansa Group Annual Report 2025 passengers, fleet
- IATA IOSA registration (membership checked 13 Oct 2026)
- MIT News / Journal of Air Transport Management (Barnett, 2024) risk per flight 2018–2022
- CAPA Lufthansa takeover, 2009
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