Jetstar safety record

Since its first flight on 25 May 2004, no Jetstar flight has had a fatal accident. Qantas set Jetstar up as its low-fares airline; it flies Airbus A320s and A321s, most of the newer ones long-range A321LRs, and Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners from Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and its other bases in Australia and New Zealand, and it carried about 25.5 million passengers in the year to June 2026.

Australia's independent investigators, the ATSB, have looked into several Jetstar events that ended safely. In July 2007 an A320 going around in fog at Melbourne sank to within 38 feet of the ground because the pilots did not know which mode the automatic flight system was in. The ATSB found Jetstar had changed Airbus's go-around procedure without assessing the risk; Jetstar went back to the manufacturer's procedure. In June 2009 a small fire broke out at the corner of a cockpit window on a Jetstar A330 from Osaka; the crew put it out and landed at Guam, and Airbus then ran a worldwide programme to replace the A330 windshields built with the same sealant.

In May 2024 a Jetstar A320 veered onto the grass as it turned off the runway at Christchurch, after a hydraulic pipe failed in flight and took away its nosewheel steering, and the thrust levers were set wrongly during the turn; no one was hurt. New Zealand's investigators traced the failure to a pipe that had been dented in its packaging years before it was fitted. Jetstar added a procedure for landing and taxiing without nosewheel steering, and Airbus clarified its guidance on the thrust levers.

Jetstar Asia in Singapore, which closed in July 2025, Jetstar Japan, and Jetstar Pacific in Vietnam until 2020 also flew under the Jetstar name; we found no fatal accident at any of them. Jetstar holds its own operating certificate from Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority, separate from Qantas's.