Report on Airline Safety Rates Individual Carriers : Transportation: New study covers 10 years of worldwide flight-accident statistics.

About six months ago, a team of researchers affiliated with the International Airline Passengers Assn. sat down and started thinking hard about plane crashes. They crunched numbers. They studied hijackings and botched landings. And now they’ve come up with a report rating the safety of the world’s major airlines.

Their conclusions: In India or Colombia, stay on the ground. But if you’re flying American, British Airways, Delta, Lufthansa, SAS or Southwest Airlines, rest easy.

Keep in mind that safety is ultimately impossible to quantify, and that these assessments come from a non-governmental group that was created not to be a watchdog, but to sell travel insurance. But these researchers seem to have done a lot of homework.

Their principal safety criteria, based on evaluations of records from various sources, were fatal accidents per million flights and flight-related deaths per million passengers; the report also notes pilot training and aircraft maintenance at various airlines, and air traffic infrastructure of individual countries, among other things. (The federal National Transportation Safety Board annually reports accident rates among flights involving U.S. territory, but doesn’t usually break figures down by carrier.) The summary of Airline Passengers Assn. findings, published by the Bermuda-based Major Airline Catastrophe Research and Assistance Foundation, was sent to members as an “IAPA Travel Safety Alert” in September.

First the good news from the report: Among the world’s largest air carriers (those with at least 2 million flights over the last decade), American, British Airways, Delta, Lufthansa, SAS and Southwest can each claim fewer than one fatal accident per 2.5 million flights and fewer than one flight-related fatality per 4 million passengers.

Records reviewed by the IAPA, which covered 10 years ending January, 1992, showed that American Airlines had flown more than 9 million flights without an accident--apparently an unparalleled feat. (“No other airline has invested so much in innovative ways to train pilots,” noted the report.) Lufthansa’s fatality rate was one per 20 million passengers. SAS hadn’t had an accident in 24 years. And Southwest, through 17 years of existence and 3.6 million flights, had never had an accident. (It still hasn’t.)

Among mid-sized airlines (1 million to 2 million flights), the IAPA found the following carriers with no accidents from 1982 to 1992: America West, Ansett Airlines of Australia, Canadian Airlines International, Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia).

Among medium-small airlines (600,000 to 1 million flights), the following carriers were found to have no accidents over that time: Alaska Airlines, Finnair, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Malaysia Airlines and Swissair.

A raft of other U.S. carriers come in under the rating “very good”: Continental, Northwest, United, TWA and USAir. Japan Air Systems was in the same category.

Any safety ranking is likely to prompt questions about methodology. Though the IAPA praised United’s accident rate of less than one per 2 million flights, United spokesman Joe Hopkins suggests that other measures are even more impressive. Of the carrier’s three accidents since 1989, Hopkins says, the National Transportation Safety Board assigned blame to the airline in just one case, which the airline disputes. Should all three accidents, Hopkins asks, be counted against the airline?

“You could argue about these things,” allows David Stempler, Washington counsel for the IAPA.

The worst news in the IAPA report comes from India and Colombia. Researchers concluded that the air accident rates for domestic flights there are 10 times higher than for flights in the rest of the record-keeping world. (Records from former Soviet bloc countries and China were considered insufficient and excluded from the report.) If North American and European carriers had the same fatal-accidents-to-flights ratio as India and Colombia, the researchers asserted, “there would be one fatal crash every 12 days in North America and one fatal crash each month in Europe.”

The researchers excepted the international carrier Air India from its warning (that airline, they say, has an “acceptable” safety record), but sounded a loud alarm about India’s domestic airways, where Indian Airlines is the dominant carrier. In April, 1993, an armed hijacker took over a Srinagar-to-New Delhi flight and held hostages in the city of Amritsar for 10 hours until Indian commandos freed the group, killing one hijacker. In the same month, a 737 attempting to take off struck a truck on a public road, then hit power lines, killing more than 50 passengers. )

At the India Tourist Office in New York, director Ram P. Chopra called the report “highly exaggerated” and noted that since the incidents cited, the government had grounded and reviewed planes for safety. He also said the government has now decided on a $570-million program to upgrade its civil aviation facilities.

The report on Colombia warned about not only domestic flights, but also international flights involving that country. It cited a May, 1993, crash in which a flight controller failed to correct a mistaken pilot whose plane smashed into a mountain (killing 125 passengers) and an analysis by Colombian aviation officials finding serious maintenance and discipline problems in the industry there.

Most chillingly, the report quoted the Colombian government’s attempt to minimize the problems in its introduction to the aviation officials’ findings: “Excluding 1983, 1986, 1988 and 1990. . . fatality risk in Colombian air travel is very low compared to other countries.”

In the Colombian Consulate’s Los Angeles office, a spokeswoman said flying in that country is “not dangerous. Any country has some problems.”