Lion Air: False rumor says airline had 1-star safety rating

The
International Air Transport Association said that the low safety
rating attributed to them was not real.
Twitter/Alvin Lie/Business Insider

• A hoax after the Lion Air crash that likely killed 189
  people claimed that there were serious red flags about the
  airlines safety.
• It said the International Air Transport
  Association (IATA) had given the airline the lowest
  possible safety rating.
• A fake screenshot of the IATA’s website said Lion Air
  had one star out of a possible seven.
• But it isn’t true — the IATA confirmed to Business
  Insider that it does not rank or rate individual airlines, and
  said “airline safety rankings are inherently flawed.”

A viral post claims that Lion Air had been ranked with the lowest
possible safety record, but is an untrue forgery which emerged in
the wake of a fatal crash this week.

Lion Air flight JT 610 crashed into the sea on Monday and killed
everyone on board. It has
a history of occasional safety issues, but was widely
considered safe to use before Monday’s crash.

However, a faked screenshot purporting to be from the
International Air Transport Association (IATA) website says
otherwise.

It listed Lion Air among a number of other Indonesian airlines,
claiming that they all have a one-star rating and the “lowest
safety performance”. The post has been spreading on social media,
particularly in Indonesia itself. 

But the IATA told Business Insider that the ranking was not
from them, and that it does not even publish airline safety
ratings.

An IATA spokesperson told Business Insider: “We would like
to clarify that it is not
an IATA document.”

In a statement earlier this year, the IATA said that “does
not consider airline safety ratings or rankings to be a valid
measure of an individual organization’s safety performance.”

It also says that there “no objective criteria or metrics exist
by which it is possible to do this” and questioned the validity
of rankings produced elsewhere.

Read more:
 
What
we know about the victims of the Lion Air plane crash off
Indonesia, where there were ‘likely no survivors’

It says that “airline safety rankings are inherently flawed” and
instead it considers
the overall safety of the commercial airline industry.

Twitter user Alvin Lie drew
attention to the hoax, sharing an image of the screenshot
which lists the airlines as “non recommended.” The tweet, which
is in Indonesian, urged people to not spread hoaxes.

It also included a statement from the IATA’s office in Indonesia
that says the organization “has never made this kind of
statements [sic] especially for public consumption.”

Tweet Embed:
//twitter.com/mims/statuses/1057780814560161792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Foto/ screenshot ini beredar luas pasca kecelakaan Lion Air
PK-LQP (JT610 tgl 29 Okt).
Mohon diperhatikan bahwa iti adalah KABAR BOHONG/ Hoax.

IATA sudah menerbitkan BANTAHAN & Penjelasan Resmi

Mohon kita cermati agar tidak menjadi korban hoax & tidak
ikut menyebarkannya pic.twitter.com/Ky24mLTLqz

Lion Air performs well in other airline safety rankings. It
gets
six out of seven stars by AirlineRatings.com, which considers
things like its fatality record and whether the airline is
endorsed by the US Federal Aviation Authority.

It is not clear whether this rating has been updated since
Monday’s crash.

But the safety record of Lion Air and of Indonesian airlines
generally has come under increased scrutiny since the flight
plunged into the Java sea en route from Jakarta to Bangka
Island in what was
the worst airliner accident of 2018.

Families
of passengers on the crashed Lion Air flight look at the
belongings of passengers in Jakarta’s Tanjung Priok
port.
REUTERS/Beawiharta

Lion Air previously had one fatal accident, in 2004, and
has recorded at least a dozen since 2002, Quartz
reported. A Lion Air flight also crashed into the sea in
2013, but
all on board survived.

Read more: 


Divers
found the black box from the Lion Air flight that crashed into
the Java Sea

Indonesia’s aviation record was so poor for years that

the US and EU had blacklisted the country’s carriers from
flying into their countries. The bans have since been lifted.
The EU only lifted its ban in June, though it allowed Lion Air to
operate from an earlier date.