article_snippet: Aviation experts today reassured travellers that The Airbus A320 is still one of the safest planes in the world despite a crash in the French Alps which claimed 150 lives.
article_snippet: Paul Hayes, safety director at aviation consultancy
article_snippet: Ascend, said: 'The A320 family has a very good safety record considering that there is a fleet of 6,000 aircraft out there.'
article_snippet: The safety of The Airbus A320 is being looked at following the Germanwings crash in France (file photo) Safety experts said it was too early to speculate on the case of the Germanwings crash in France, but noted that accidents during the cruise phase of the flight are rare, even though this comes less than three months after the AirAsia disaster. '
article_snippet: We have had a couple of events recently but in general jetliners don't crash during the cruise,' said Hayes.
article_snippet: According to separate surveys published last year by manufacturers Airbus and Boeing, only 10 to 12 per cent of fatal accidents take place when the aircraft is at cruise height.
article_snippet: The 150-seat medium-haul jet is one of the world's most intensively used, together with The 150-seat medium-haul jet main rival, the Boeing 737.
article_snippet: Experts say The 150-seat medium-haul jet safety record is among the aerospace industry's highest, but The 150-seat medium-haul jet made grim headlines in December when The Airbus A320 plummeted into the Java Sea, killing all 162 people on board.
article_snippet: Boeing statistics for Boeing rival's best-selling model show that up to the end of 2013, there were 0.14 fatal The Airbus A320 accidents per million departures where the plane was destroyed or written off.
article_snippet: The comparable versions of Boeing 737 had a rate of 0.11 per million departures, making them both among the industry's safest models compared with the industry average of 0.76, or more than 4.6 for the earliest days of the jet age.