To begin with, every major U.S. airline is safe. Very, very safe. David Castelveter of the Air Transport Association of America says the "​safety of all U.S. carriers is the best it ever has been"​ and that he "​would not hesitate to fly any carrier."​ And indeed, when you look at the numbers, commercial air travel in the United States today is about as safe as it gets.

Incidents do happen, just very infrequently. And actual accidents are extremely rare, especially ones with fatalities. According to AirSafe.com, the last fatal crash of a commercial U.S. passenger plane was on Feb. 12, 2009, when a Colgan Air regional plane operating as Continental Connection Flight 3407 crashed into a residence in Buffalo, N.Y. The tragedy left 50 people dead, including 45 passengers, two pilots, two flight attendants and one person who was in the house at the time.

We thought a useful exercise would be to look at all of the documented incidents involving commercial U.S. passenger flights in 2010 and then rank which airlines fared the best. It would have been overly simplistic (not to mention, lazy) to leave it at that, so we decided the results would be more accurate if we disregarded the incidents where the airlines weren'​t at fault. It'​s not really fair to blame an airline when the incident is the result of a bird collision (33 of them last year, sometimes leading to more damage than you'​d think), an unruly passenger (36 cases) or a medical emergency (31 incidents). There were also several episodes of turbulence leading to injuries, and even five instances where a flight was struck by lightning.