Four airlines you should never fly

Philly.com has an article by Robert McGarvey about some bad flying:

It has never been safer to fly.
That is despite the apparent purposeful crash of a Germanwings plane that killed a hundred and fifty people earlier this week. The co-pilot is said by French prosecutors to have crashed the plane into the Alps, for reasons currently unknown.
It also is despite the deaths of some three hundred on board Malaysia Air flight 17 when it was shot down over the Ukraine in July of 2014. Western intelligence sources have blamed pro-Russian insurgents. Russia has blamed the Ukrainian government.
And it is despite the disappearance of Malaysia Air flight 370 earlier in 2014, where some two hundred and forty people are believed to have died.
Those three crashes, while all mysterious, captivated the world’s eyeballs on round-the-clock cable news coverage. So the belief has taken hold that flying today is more dangerous than ever. It’s not, insist experts who have crunched the numbers and reached the entirely opposite opinion. Although the experts do acknowledge that some airlines are in fact too dangerous to fly. Names are named below.
As for current safety, numbers compiled by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) show that in fact 2014 was remarkably safe. There were thirty-eight million flights and twelve fatal accidents. That compares to thirty-four million flights and twenty-three fatal accidents in 2010. 2014 did top the recent list for fatalities, with 641. In recent years only 2010, with 786, saw more deaths. Note: the IATA excludes MH17 from its count, because that crash was not an “accident”. Add in those 298 souls, and 2014 becomes a very deadly year indeed, but air travel nonetheless remains safe.
Either way, and with no lack of compassion for those who died and their families, dying in the crash of a regularly scheduled commercial flight is statistically comparable to winning the lottery. It just occurs very infrequently, at least in developed nations, especially those in North America and Europe, where pilot training, aircraft safety, and airport policies are advanced and enforced.
Veteran pilot Patrick Smith, who blogs at AskThePilot, is adamant about the safety of the skies. According to Smith: “the past decade has been the safest in civil aviation history, and the cluster of serious accidents over the past year, tragic as they've been, is unlikely to change the overall trend.” Smith added: “The accident rate is still down, considerably, from what it was twenty or thirty years ago, when multiple large-scale accidents were the norm. What's different is that, in years past, we didn't have a constant news cycle with media outlets spread across multiple platforms, all vying simultaneously for your attention. The media didn't used to fixate so intensely on crashes the way it does today.”
Smith is right. Data at PlaneCrashInfo.com, for instance, shows over forty fatal crashes in 1971 alone. There were 35 in 1989. That compares again to twelve in 2014.
Pilot Thomas Morrison refreshed our memories of recent U.S. aviation history:
“The last fatal accident by an American operated airline was Colgan 3407 in February of 2009,” Morrison said. That was a commuter jet carrying forty-nine. All died. But that also means there have been six fatality free years in US flying.
But do not assume passengers are safe everywhere. They are not. Gary Reeves, chief safety pilot at PilotSafety.org, elaborated: “Flying is safer today than it ever has been," he said. "That being said many low-budget foreign based carriers are not held to the higher standards of the FAA. When booking travel on ‘cheap’ international carriers, be aware of what you are getting. Typically you'll get younger much less experienced pilots, as low as one-third the minimum training required for US-certified carriers, at very low pay and worse working conditions. Maintenance and safety inspections may also be a lot less than what is required here.”
Monitoring organization AirlineRatings.com ranks the globe’s commercial carriers, and it gives 149 its top, seven star rating (Australia’s Qantas, with a fatality-free record in the jet era, is the perennial best of the best). But four airlines achieved only one star for safety, the lowest possible rating:

Kam Air (Afghanistan)
Nepal Airlines
Scat (Kazakhstan)
Tara Air (Nepal)

Understand, too, none of the one star carriers are currently permitted to fly in US airspace because the Federal Aviation Administration holds every carrier that wants entry to US commercial aviation standards, and many smaller, foreign carriers don’t qualify.
Pilot Morrison added about the lack of aviation safety in some parts of the world: “This can be attributed to a general lack of oversight and budget constraints by the institutions in these regions. Unfortunately in some areas the social ability to fly outweighs the technical ability to operate up to American standards.”
Malaysia Air, incidentally, despite a difficult 2014, scored five of seven points according to these ratings. Germanwings scored seven of seven.
Bottom line, despite recent horrific crashes, flying is safe. Very safe. As long as it is on a carrier that meets US and Western European standards.

Rico says that statistics won't help you if you're on a plane that's going down. (And the closest that Rico and his father ever came to dying was on a US airline landing, in broad daylight, at Kona Airport in Hawai'i...