In a word: yes. Just because budget airlines charge cheap fares, it doesn’t mean they compromise on safety to save costs. In fact, budget airlines are arguably safer than many of their traditional “full service” airline competitors for a number of reasons:
– Brand New Planes
Most budget airlines only came into existence in the last decade, and as a result have some of the newest models of airplanes currently in service which have the latest safety mechanisms and procedures.
– Streamlined maintenance
As well as having new planes, budget airlines also typically use only one model of plane. The Boeing 737 is the most popular aircraft used by low cost carriers around the world. By only having one model of aircraft in their fleet, budget airlines streamline their maintenance and repair costs and make staff training much easier, rather than having several different types of older airplane in a legacy fleet to maintain, each with their own idiosyncrasies.
– Keeping A Flawless Safety Record
The perception that budget flights are inherently less safe than full service flights is a difficult one for low cost carriers to erase, so budget airlines are hyper sensitive about maintaining their reputation and flight safety record. They realize that an accident would be a disaster for their company in every sense of the word. As such, budget airlines strive to have flawless safety records rather than considering any compromise on safety in order to cut costs.
The world’s oldest budget airline, America’s Southwest, has never had a crash in 40 years of operation – that’s over 12 million flights. South West pioneered much of the uniform way of running an airline with the same planes and streamlined procedures which has been adopted as the blueprint for virtually every other budget airline. The UK’s two biggest budget flight operators, Ryanair and Easyjet, have also never suffered a crash throughout their company history.
