Safest Airlines in Europe 2026: AirAdvisor Ranking

Ticket prices reveal little about an airline’s safety. Find out which carriers topped the European Airline Safety Index 2026

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A cheap ticket often raises suspicion: if an airline cuts so many corners on price, is it cutting them on safety too? Plenty of travellers have wondered about this, so AirAdvisor decided to test the idea with data. It compiled the 2026 European Airline Safety Index, and the answer to the question of which are the safest airlines in Europe turned out to be less obvious than you might expect.

The ranking covers the twenty largest carriers on the continent: ten low-cost and ten full-service. They were selected by 2025 flight volumes, based on EUROCONTROL data. Analysts looked at a ten-year period, from 2016 to 2025, and scored each airline against six criteria. The results were reported by Euronews Travel.

Greece’s Aegean Airlines took first place with 89 points out of 100, followed by Ryanair and Austrian Airlines. Three of the top five are low-cost carriers, which puts a real dent in the “cheap means risky” stereotype.

Read also: the world’s most expensive airlines in 2026.

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How AirAdvisor scored the airlines: six criteria

Each airline could earn a maximum of 100 points, made up of six components with different weights:

- safety record (40%): accidents according to IATA reports for 2016–2025;

- certification and audits (20%): inspection history and ICAO’s assessment of national aviation oversight;

- operational safety (15%): safety management systems and flight data monitoring;

- fleet age and technical profile (10%);

- pilot training (10%);

- financial stability (5%).

The biggest weight goes to actual accident statistics, but the other components leave room to assess how a company works to prevent problems. There is one important caveat. The scores for operational safety, fleet, training and finances were derived by the analysts from publicly available regulatory and corporate information, so they are not the result of an independent audit of each airline. AirAdvisor itself stresses that the index is comparative and does not say whether any particular airline is safe or not.

Read also: the EU is preparing new cabin baggage rules that could significantly change the terms of flying with low-cost airlines.

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Europe’s safest airlines: the full ranking of 20 carriers

- Aegean Airlines, 89 (full-service)

- Ryanair, 86 (low-cost)

- Austrian Airlines, 85.5 (full-service)

- Norwegian, 85 (low-cost)

- SunExpress, 84.5 (low-cost)

- Air France, British Airways and Iberia, 83.5 each (full-service)

- Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa, 83 each (full-service)

- KLM, 82.5 (full-service)

- easyJet, 82 (low-cost)

- Eurowings (low-cost) and SAS (full-service), 81.5 each

- Wizz Air, 79.5 (low-cost)

- Transavia, 79 (low-cost)

- Vueling, 77 (low-cost)

- Jet2, 73 (low-cost)

- SWISS, 72.5 (full-service)

- Pegasus Airlines, 64.5 (low-cost)

Between sixth and eleventh place the results are tightly bunched: six traditional carriers fall within a range of 82.5 to 83.5 points. The lower end of the table does not mean an airline is unsafe, and the authors of the index explicitly ask readers not to interpret it that way.

New Ryanair routes for summer 2027: see the link.

Why Aegean came first and what Ryanair gets right

Aegean scored the maximum 40 out of 40 for safety record: in ten years it had not a single accident that made it into IATA’s reports. On top of that came 13 out of 15 for operational safety, 9 out of 10 for its young fleet and a full 5 out of 5 for financial stability. There are simply no weak spots in its scorecard, and that is what gave it the edge.

Ryanair dropped just two points on safety, scoring 38 out of 40, because of two accidents without fatalities in April and October 2023. For Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, 13 out of 15 for operational safety looks convincing. The airline was credited for flight data monitoring, a confidential incident reporting system and training that teaches pilots to manage threats and errors.

A perfect safety score does not guarantee a high place. British Airways, SAS and Eurowings also scored 40 out of 40 but missed the top five: the index weighs all six components together.

We have already covered how much it costs to fly with a cat or dog in 2026.

Low-cost vs full-service airlines: what the numbers say

The ten low-cost carriers averaged 79.2 points, against 82.8 for the ten full-service airlines. A gap of 3.6 points is smaller than you might assume. On safety record the difference is even more modest: 34.3 versus 35.5 out of 40. On operational safety both groups scored an identical 10.6 out of 15, so there is almost no difference between them in safety management and flight monitoring.

Full-service airlines won in one area: certification and audits, where they scored 18.4 against 15.9 for low-cost carriers. Those 2.5 points explain roughly 70% of the overall gap. Low-cost airlines, in turn, came out ahead on fleet condition, 7.8 versus 7.1 out of 10, and Wizz Air and Pegasus got the maximum here. AirAdvisor CEO Anton Radchenko points out that a young aircraft is no guarantee of safety on its own, while an older one that is well maintained can fly safely for decades. Overall, he says, the price of a ticket tells you very little about how safe an airline is.

Important! Since 6 September, EU borders have switched to stricter EES rules. We covered the main changes in our previous article.

What the latest IATA statistics for 2025 show

The index draws on IATA reports, so it is worth looking at the latest one, for 2025, published in March 2026. Airlines worldwide operated 38.7 million flights, with 51 accidents recorded. The overall rate came to 1.32 per million flights, compared with 1.42 a year earlier.

The long-term trend is more encouraging. A decade ago, in 2012–2016, there was one fatal accident for every 3.5 million flights; for 2021–2025 it is one for every 5.6 million. Airlines on the IOSA audit registry had a rate of 0.98, against 2.55 for those that have not been audited.

There is also a less comfortable figure that should not be glossed over. There were eight fatal accidents in 2025, up from seven in 2024, and onboard fatalities rose from 244 to 394. At the same time, the most common events were tail strikes, landing gear problems, runway excursions and ground damage, which means mostly incidents without tragic consequences.

What to look at when choosing the safest airline

An ordinary passenger does not need to study every company’s audits and incident history before booking. European commercial aviation operates in a tightly regulated environment, and serious accidents remain very rare. The difference between low-cost and full-service carriers in the index is so small that you are better off choosing by route, schedule and fare conditions.

If you are flying with a little-known carrier, you can check the list of airlines banned or restricted from operating in the EU, which is maintained by the European Commission. It is also worth checking whether the carrier is on the IOSA registry.

A safety ranking is reassuring, but it does not tell you what to do when a trip goes off plan. A flight can be delayed or cancelled, luggage can go missing, and in a foreign country you may suddenly need a doctor.

Travel insurance covers exactly these situations. Depending on the policy terms, it can cover emergency medical care, trip cancellation or delay, loss and theft of personal belongings, accidents and emergency evacuation. So when you pick an airline on price or schedule, it makes sense to think about protection against disruptions at the same time. Terms and coverage amounts differ from policy to policy, so read carefully what is included before you buy.

Choose a travel insurance policy on Visit World: enter your citizenship and destination country and buy your insurance online before you leave.

Reminder! A new low-cost airline project, Fly2Galicia, is launching in Europe and will link Santiago de Compostela in Spain with cities in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic. We have already covered the routes, ticket prices and the start date.

Photo: generated with Gemini