airline safety

Qantas safety record

No one has died in an accident on a Qantas flight since 1951, and no Qantas jet has ever had a fatal accident or been written off. On airlines like Qantas, the chance of a passenger dying in an accident is about 1 in 80 million per flight.

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No one on board has died in an accident since 1951
Chance of dying in an accident, per flight1 in 80 million

For airlines based in Australia and the other countries in the same safety group, 2018–2022 (MIT study).

Put another way: if you took a flight every single day, you would, on average, fly for about 219,000 years before a fatal accident happened to you.

the record

No fatal accident since 1951, and never one in a jet

The famous line is that Qantas has never crashed. What is true is narrower: Qantas has flown jets since 1959 and none has ever had a fatal accident or been written off, and no one has died in an accident on a Qantas flight since December 1951.

Before that, in its first three decades, the published record lists about fourteen fatal events, including two aircraft shot down in 1942 while flying for the Allies. The last was a de Havilland Dragon in New Guinea in 1951.

The closest call of the jet era was flight 1 in 1999, a 747 that overran the runway on landing at Bangkok; it was damaged and repaired, and no one was killed.

since 1970

Nothing to put on the line

Each dot would be a fatal event on a Qantas flight since 1970. There are none.

197019801990200020102020
Its own flights
your flight

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at a glance

Qantas in numbers

Founded
1920
Country
Australia
Alliance
Oneworld
Main hubs
Sydney · Melbourne · Brisbane · Perth
IATA safety audit (IOSA)
Registered
the fleet

What Qantas flies

Tap a plane for its own safety record.

Airbus A380 See its safety record Airbus A330 See its safety record Boeing 787 Dreamliner See its safety record Airbus A320 family See its safety record Boeing 737 NG See its safety record
on the day

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  • ✓Where you are in the flight, and how long until the bumpy stretch is behind you
An iPhone Lock Screen showing the FlyBud Live Activity: Barcelona to Istanbul, gate B23, boarding, with the same flight in the Dynamic Island at the top of the screen.

Qantas safety questions

How safe is Qantas?

No one has died in an accident on a Qantas flight since 1951, and no Qantas jet has ever had a fatal accident or been written off. On airlines like Qantas, the chance of a passenger dying in an accident is about 1 in 80 million per flight. Every fact on this page is sourced — the list is at the bottom.

What is Qantas' safety rating?

There is no single official safety rating for airlines; the scores some websites publish are their own formulas. What can be checked is the record: no fatal accident since 1951 and none in a jet since Qantas began flying them in 1959. It is a member of IATA, the airlines' trade body, which requires its members to pass IATA's operational safety audit (IOSA).

Is it true Qantas has never crashed?

Not quite. Qantas had about fourteen fatal events between 1927 and 1951, two of them wartime shoot-downs. What is true is that no Qantas jet has ever had a fatal accident, and no one has died in an accident on a Qantas flight since 1951.

sources

Where these facts come from

Every fact on this page comes from official accident reports, the airline's own figures or the published accident record.

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