World's Biggest Airlines Quiz

T5 is a great place to transfer at

best airlines to fly with IMO in my somewhat limited experience include Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates, Etihad, Korean Air.... and maybe British Airways at the bottom of that list. Qatar is okay but very overrated imho. I also use Cebu Pacific and Southwest a lot, they're fine and their prices make up for whatever they lack in amenities. Plus Cebu has access to the best terminal in Manila. but I wouldn't use them for a very long flight. Worst is probably a tie between Philippine Airlines, Ethiopian, and Nas.

Singapore, Korean, and Air Canada are all great! United has become a joke and Varig (not listed, Brazil) is the worst airline I've ever flown.

I'd have Singapore, Cathay, Emirates and Etihad at the top; Qantas, KLM, Lufthansa, Finnair, Virgin a half star rating less, and unfortunately BA and United not much better than the "budget" carriers

Best to fly with ......around the world are Qantas followed by British Airways then Cathay Pacific and Singapore ..... In USA Delta.

The most fun stuert I ever had was a British Airways one over 20 years ago. He made the safety briefing more interesting than the usual snooze and he gave us (two 16-yr olds) mini bottles of Johnny Walker.

Kal, I hope your were joking when you called your experiences "somewhat limited". I've flown American, United, and Northwest. That is truly limited. I had no problems on any of those except for my infernal air sickness and I don't think I can blame that on the airlines.

ander: while I know my travels are much more extensive than the average person's... there are still quite a few airlines in the world I have never used before or used only once or twice. I don't want to presume to know based on this what the best airlines are.

I think Swiss deserves a mention in the list of truly great airlines. Haven't flown on too many airlines, and none outside Europe yet (apart from two short flights on South African Airlink), but Swiss is éásily the best airline I've flown on. KLM can be decent too, but it varies. Staff tends to be very nice though.

That's why you check the source Wikipedia links you to.

Who do you think would edit a wikipedia article? A person who has done research or has a professional source, or a random person who said "Hmmmm?!?!? I'll just make up some numbers!!"

As part of a research experiment a few years back, I inserted made-up numbers to about 200 wikipedia articles. The first was corrected within about 3 minutes, most (~82%) had been corrected within two weeks, but 2 are still there (they're like my pets. I check on them regularly.) Additionally 8 of the 11 accounts I created to make the additions were banned from ever editing things again.

You're absolutely right @plattitude. I just once changed a grammar mistake (which I should not have since it was grammatically correct, but I didn't know) and then I reloaded the page. The change was still there, but I reloaded a second time after ~1.5 minutes, and it was reverted back to the original. Wikipedia has incredible quality control and there are many people working to make Wikipedia as accurate as it could be :)

@Pandora49, exactly. What surprised me the most were which articles were corrected the fastest. I expected that pages with a high view rate would get corrected quickly--and they did, almost all between 6 hours and 5 days after the erroneous addition. What surprised me was the ones that were corrected the quickest were deeply technical articles about nuclear science, quantum mechanics, and abstract mathematics that our analytics said were accessed by fewer than 3 unique viewers per week. These were especially sad, because I'd put in multiple days worth of effort to make them seem plausible, and they were gone within the hour. One even sparked a fairly lengthy discussion on why it was wrong, though it appeared correct at first glance.

The problem with wikipedia is not people maliciously changing it, but relying on a site like this they don't know relies on wikipedia and creating a circular reinforcement with no source. Then even if no one tampers with the page the data can go out of date but none of the sites in the loop update. May I suggest going by number of flights from Flightfrom: https://www.flightsfrom.com/top-100-airlines or a smaller list from statista (sourced) from 2020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/269617/top-10-airlines-worldwide-by-number-of-passengers/

spirit: we charge for literally everything

Why would you even print out boarding passes anymore? An electronic image should be enough. Even two years ago when you made your comment.

In Europe it's quite far from "no other airline".

^ they might be following the asinine standard set by RyanAir, then. I never had anyone else tell me that I HAD to have a printed ticket... not since I was flying through Taiwan over 10 years ago... and then that online check-in closed FOUR HOURS before the flight. Why? WHY?? Did the computer go on break? Does it take 3 hours for the electronic message moving at the speed of light from their server to get to the check-in counter? Bandits.

I remember when Ryanair tried charging a pound to use the toilet

My daughter was charged 20 pounds for not having printed her own boarding pass. Since North American airlines don't require it, she was quite surprised. The clerk admitted that it was a rip off and generally affected North American tourists. Baltic air also required a self check and printed pass but the clerk in Gdansk did it for me 30 min before the flight -- he though the requirement was ridiculous. European discount airlines continually invent new surcharges and sometimes a national airline like KLM is a better idea.

^ the same jovial chap who called people who fly his airline idiots and his mistreated employees whiners.