Originally Posted by rickair7777

Actually this is not the case at all, the Europeans are not quite as safe as US airlines. If you look at comparable operations (ie compare regionals to regionals, international to international).

There are blatant examples of things which would probably not have happened in the US: Flying a stalled widebody into the ocean with full aft stick deflection. Germanwings dude, whose mental and other health records were protected from his employer and regulators by european privacy laws. Two TCAS equipped airliners collide because a center controller was taking a nap, illegally but tolerated by the private contractor who employed him.

But of course they are much safer than any of the rest of the world other than the US, by a large margin.