JACDEC

Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre (JACDEC) is a company that provides commercial aviation safety analysis.

The company promotes the ‘JACDEC Safety Index’, a rating system developed from the company's proprietary database. The JACDEC Centre also monitors current safety occurrences and provides updates on airline safety issues on several social networks.

The ratings take into account the number and fatality rate of the hull losses (destroyed aircraft) they have suffered in the past 30 years, more recent safety data, and number of flights flown without incident. These results do not take into account the cause of the hull losses or whether the airline is at fault, so they are not a perfect measure of how safely an airline operates.

JACDEC Airline Safety Ranking
Since 2002, JACDEC has published an annual ranking of the "Safest 60 Airlines". The index rating, JACDEC distinguishes whether an event is a total loss or a serious incident: Both will be recorded in the JACDEC Database, but in the final weighting, a total loss counts considerably more. The term "total loss" means that any repair costs of accident damage exceed the residual value of the aircraft or the aircraft was destroyed. JACDEC includes only flights where paying passengers were on board. Therefore, all freight– ferry, training, or maintenance flights– are disregarded.JACDEC considers the operational environment as one important factor for an airline's safety performance. The results of this investigation are published and can be viewed by everyone.

Controversies
JACDEC's methodology has been criticized within the airline evaluation industry as unreliable and not transparent.

The inaccuracy of the company's indexing has been debated after a list was issued for the German Newspaper Bild's website after the crash of Air France Flight 447, displaying the safety index of the world's 60 biggest airlines. The list included Turkish Airlines as the list's 60th, and least safe, airline. The starting year for the list was precisely chosen as 1973, some 36 years back. Turkish Airlines Flight 981 crashed in 1974 at a time when most of the airlines that were listed did not even exist, such as JetBlue Airways which was founded in 1999, and other regional companies with less flight frequency.

JACDEC's 2013 report was heavily criticized by Air India, after it was named as the 3rd least safest airline. The report stated that for the 30 year period, Air India had 3 hull losses, while the airline reported that it had only one fatal crash and hull loss of Air India Flight 182 in that timeframe that resulted in 329 fatalities, which was caused by an act of terrorism and not a safety factor.