Aviation safety is perhaps top of mind among most travellers today following another major air crash, which killed all of its 150 passengers on board.

The Germanwings Flight 4U9525 was en route to Dusseldorf from Barcelona when it crashed in the French Alps, with two Australians perishing in the incident.

The UNSW Head of the School of Aviation, Professor Jason Middleton, told Travel Weekly there are likely to be more crashes in future.

“Rapid expansion around the world and potential introduction of a lot of people with less experience, and aging fleets together suggests that, to me, there are likely to be a lot more accidents over the next decade, predominantly in third world, developing countries.”

“Worldwide, the fleets in many major airlines are getting older, so that’s issue number one,” Middleton told Travel Weekly.

“Issue number two is that most airlines are growing rapidly and therefore they have had to expand their flight crew numbers, they’ve had to expand their maintenance facilities and maintenance numbers, and it takes basically two years to train a pilot, it takes four years to train an engineer to the point where they can do independent work.”

Travel and airline research experts, emma (Enhanced Media Metrics Australia) powered by Ipsos, have collated data to evaluate which airlines consumers believe are safe to fly with.

From a sample of 20,225 Australians who have flown in the past 12 months (emma: Feb14-Jan15), 19.7% voted Lufthansa, parent company of Germanwings, safe to fly with, versus other airlines such as Qantas who came in at 65.4%.

“Our data shows that Australians still believe that Qantas is the safest international airline globally. Established international brands such as Singapore, Emirates & British Airways also feature highly along with the other major ANZ players in Virgin Australia and Air New Zealand,” Commercial Manager of Ipsos Luke Biggins said.

“Down the other end of the scale the Australian consumer has a low regard for the safety standards of carriers like Air China, Fiji Airways and Garuda Indonesia.”

And while not all data was collected post Malaysia Airlines’ disasters last year, looking at emma Quarterly databases it’s possible to compare what consumers feel about the safety of the airline.

Source: Aviation Safety Network

In January to March 2014, from those surveyed, 14.2% agreed or strongly agreed that Malaysia Airlines “is safe to fly with”, but by the time the data gets to the October-December quarter, this percentage is down to 6.2%.”

The 2014 global jet accident rate (measured in hull losses per 1 million flights) was 0.23, which was the lowest rate in history and the equivalent of one accident for every 4.4 million flights, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

“Any accident is one too many and safety is always aviation’s top priority. While aviation safety was in the headlines in 2014, the data show that flying continues to improve its safety performance,” said Tony Tyler, IATA’s Director General and CEO.

“In 2014 we saw a reduction in the number of fatal accidents—and that would be true even if we were to include MH 17 in the total.”

“The aviation industry has welcomed the proposal by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to move towards the adoption of a performance-based standard for global tracking of commercial aircraft, supported by multi-national operational assessments to evaluate impact and guide implementation.”

Despite the Germanwings disaster and other recent losses such as AirAsia flight QZ8501, the downing of MH17 in Ukraine and missing flight MH370, the rate of aircraft accidents is at a historical low, reports The Guardian’s Nick Evershed.

“Figures from the Bureau of Aircraft Accident Archives (BAAA) make the Germanwings crash in the Alps the 17th such incident in 2015, compared with 33 that occurred up to the same point in 2014,” Evershed told The Guardian.

“It also takes the total number of fatalities for 2015 so far at 247, which assumes the 150 on board today’s Germanwings crash have all died.

“In 2014, the BAAA says 1,328 died in aircraft accidents – the highest annual fatality figure since 2005 due to a series of crashes including AirAsia flight QZ8501 and MH17 in Ukraine.

“The rate of accidents for 2014 is at the lowest since at least 1973 and the overall trend is towards flights having fewer accidents overall.

“Despite the decreasing rate for accidents, the rate for fatalities has increased in 2014 over 2013.”

According to a Bloomberg report on Skift.com, aviation hasn’t drastically dropped in safety standards.

“Measured by number of deaths per crash, last year ranks second only to 1985, when the worst crash in airline in history killed 520 people in the mountains of Japan, according to ASN,” writes Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky.

But despite an average number of crashes, with the use of larger aircraft, the rate of casualties is on the rise.

By today’s standards, the Germanwings Airbus A320 that crashed yesterday was small, with just 150 seats.

This means that, even as air travel is generally getting much safer, when something does go wrong, more people are likely to die, according to Skift’s article.

The A320 is one of the “safer” commercial aircrafts, with only 0.08 fatal crashes per 1 million flights.