British Airways
No fatal accident on a mainline BA flight since 1976 — nearly fifty years across a vast long-haul network.
The 1985 Manchester fire was British Airtours, a separately-certificated charter subsidiary — counted under its own record per our per-operator rule.
READ THE RECORD → (opens in a new window)At this level of safety, the gap between major airlines is statistically negligible. Flying British Airways — or any major scheduled carrier — you would need to fly every day for over 25,000 years to statistically expect a fatal accident.
This figure counts years since a fatal accident, not flights — British Airways has no sourced per-airline flight total, so it can't say how many trips sit behind the record. One airline's own history, however long or short, is a far smaller sample than the worldwide figure this site already publishes: 99.999993% of boardings end safely — 1 death per 13,700,000 boardings, worldwide, 2018–2022 (MIT / ARNOLD BARNETT, 2024).
That's the whole record, checked 2026-07-09. Reading it again tonight won't change what's in it.