As global air travel roars back past pre-pandemic levels, a quieter revolution is reshaping how safely the world flies. Porter Airlines, the rapidly expanding Canadian carrier known for its Embraer E195-E2 fleet and growing transcontinental network, is joining the ranks of Southwest, Delta, Alaska, Cathay Pacific, Air New Zealand and hundreds of other airlines that adhere to a single, rigorous global benchmark for operational safety. As the industry converges around that standard, and as regulators and airlines deploy unprecedented amounts of data, 2025 and 2026 are on track to be not just very safe years for flying, but potentially the safest period the jet age has ever seen.
How a Global Safety Benchmark Became the Industry’s Gold Standard
At the heart of this story is the IATA Operational Safety Audit, better known as IOSA. Developed by the International Air Transport Association, IOSA is a comprehensive audit program that scrutinizes an airline’s operational management and control systems across flight operations, dispatch, engineering, maintenance, cabin safety, ground handling and more. Crucially, it does not examine just paperwork. Independent auditors test how an airline actually runs its flights day to day, from how crews are trained to how safety data is collected and used.
Over the last two decades, IOSA has become the de facto global operational safety benchmark for commercial airlines. All IATA member airlines must be on the IOSA registry and remain in good standing to keep their membership, and hundreds of non-member carriers have voluntarily joined. Today, more than 450 airlines worldwide are listed on the IOSA registry, a group that includes major names like Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Air New Zealand, as well as a growing roster of regional and hybrid carriers.
The benefits are striking when you look at outcomes. In IATA’s global safety analyses, airlines on the IOSA registry consistently record significantly lower accident rates than carriers that are not on the registry. In recent reporting periods, IOSA-registered airlines have had an accident rate roughly half that of non-IOSA carriers, and in some years, IOSA airlines have recorded no fatal accidents at all while still transporting hundreds of millions of passengers. That differential has turned IOSA from an optional badge of honor into a practical necessity for airlines that want to code-share, interline and compete on the world stage.
For travelers, the technical acronyms matter less than the end result. When you step onto an aircraft operated by an IOSA-registered airline, you are boarding with a carrier that has opened itself up to an intensive, recurring external safety examination against a single, globally recognized standard. The growing list of airlines that embrace that standard is a core reason experts believe 2025 and 2026 will see aviation safety climb to new heights, even as traffic surges.
Porter Airlines Steps Onto the Global Safety Stage
Porter Airlines may have started as a boutique regional operator serving business travelers out of Toronto’s downtown Billy Bishop Airport, but its trajectory over the last few years has been anything but modest. With a new fleet of fuel-efficient Embraer E195-E2 jets and an ambitious expansion to destinations across Canada, the United States and beyond, Porter is increasingly competing head-to-head with larger North American carriers on trunk routes and cross-continent journeys.
Joining the global operational safety mainstream through IOSA is a crucial step in that evolution. To attain and maintain IOSA registration, Porter must demonstrate that its operations meet hundreds of detailed safety and quality requirements. These span everything from how it certifies and checks pilots, dispatchers and maintenance engineers, to how it manages fatigue risk, weather decision-making, and the handling of irregular operations. For travelers, Porter's move signals a deliberate choice to subject itself to exactly the same level of external scrutiny as long-established global players such as Delta, Alaska, Cathay Pacific and Air New Zealand.
It is also a signal to partner airlines. IOSA registration is often a prerequisite for deep commercial cooperation, particularly code-sharing, where one airline sells seats on flights operated by another. As Porter seeks new partnerships and access to more connecting traffic, being part of the IOSA ecosystem makes the carrier an easier choice for global brands that insist their partners align to the same safety oversight framework they themselves follow.
From a competitive standpoint, the move puts Porter in the company of leading North American and Asia-Pacific airlines that use their safety credentials as a core part of their brand. For passengers comparing options on dense transborder and domestic routes, a carrier’s visible commitment to recognized safety standards is increasingly part of the decision, even if they are not familiar with the technicalities of IOSA itself.
What IOSA Actually Checks: Behind the Audit Curtain
IOSA is often described as a checklist, but industry insiders stress that it has evolved into far more than a one-size-fits-all form. Today’s IOSA program is built on hundreds of standards and recommended practices set out in the IOSA Standards Manual, ranging across flight operations, operational control, aircraft engineering, ground handling, cargo, security aspects of operations and safety management systems. Auditors spend days inside an airline, reviewing documentation, interviewing staff at every level, and sampling real operations to see how closely practice aligns with policy.
In recent years the program has shifted to a risk-based model. Rather than applying exactly the same depth of scrutiny in every area for every airline, auditors now focus more intensively on the specific safety risks that are most relevant to the airline being examined. A carrier operating long overwater flights across the Pacific, for example, faces different operational challenges from a short-haul domestic operator. The risk-based IOSA approach tailors the audit scope accordingly, while also assessing the maturity of an airline’s safety-critical systems and its safety culture.
For airlines, this means the audit is more than a compliance exercise. It is a candid health check that highlights where safety performance is strong and where vulnerabilities may be emerging. For carriers like Southwest, Delta, Alaska, Cathay Pacific and Air New Zealand, which have been through multiple IOSA cycles, the audit has become a structured way to benchmark themselves not just against regulations but against international best practice. Porter’s arrival in this club gives it access to that same comparative lens.
Crucially, IOSA audits are recurrent. Registration is not a one-off milestone but a status that must be maintained through periodic re-audits and continuous conformity. That requirement pushes airlines to embed safety management deeply into daily operations, supported by data reporting and internal oversight, rather than treating safety as something that is only examined every few years.
Safety By the Numbers: Why 2025–2026 Could Break Records
Any discussion about the future of aviation safety has to start with the broader trend line. For all the attention that each serious accident rightly receives, the long-term statistics from organizations such as IATA and the International Civil Aviation Organization show a clear pattern: over the last decade, accident rates have steadily declined, even as global flight numbers have grown to tens of millions of departures every year.
In its recent safety reports, IATA has documented some remarkable benchmarks. Ahead of the current cycle, the global all-accident rate for commercial jet and turboprop operations fell to historically low levels, and a number of years have seen just a single fatal commercial accident worldwide. In 2023, for example, the industry recorded an all-accident rate of less than one accident per million flights and only one fatal accident, and IOSA-registered airlines reported no fatal accidents at all, despite operating a large share of global traffic.
The picture is more complex in 2024 and 2025. Both ICAO and IATA data show that as traffic fully rebounded and surpassed pre-pandemic levels, the number of accidents and fatalities ticked back up from the exceptional lows of 2023. But even with those increases, accident rates remain below pre-pandemic norms, and the long-term five-year averages continue to move in the right direction. Safety specialists emphasize that short-term fluctuations are inevitable when you are looking at very small numbers against a huge base of flights. What matters is that the underlying systems, data-sharing and safety governance are stronger than ever.
This is where 2025 and 2026 come into focus. Industry bodies project nearly five billion air travelers this year, and even more in 2026, but they do so while also pointing to increasingly sophisticated safety tools now deployed at scale. A growing proportion of global traffic is carried by airlines on the IOSA registry. Safety management systems are mature in most major carriers. Data monitoring, predictive analytics and cross-industry learning networks are embedding a culture where emerging risks are spotted and mitigated earlier. Put together, these trends underpin expert expectations that the next two years could see accident rates push toward, or even beyond, the record lows set just before the pandemic recovery turbulence.
From Checklists to Data: How Technology Is Reinventing Safety
One reason airlines like Delta, Alaska, Cathay Pacific, Air New Zealand and now Porter are optimistic about the safety trajectory is that they are no longer relying solely on reactive investigations. Modern commercial aviation is awash in data. Every flight generates streams of information from flight data recorders, aircraft health monitoring systems, air traffic control logs and more. Airlines feed this into flight data monitoring and analysis programs that look for patterns and precursors long before they result in an incident.
For example, if pilots on a particular fleet type are consistently approaching a specific runway with slightly higher than recommended speeds, or if a subset of airports is associated with more frequent unstable approaches, that pattern will show up in the data, often across thousands of flights. Safety teams can then intervene with targeted training, updated procedures or even infrastructure changes at the affected airports. The same principle applies to turbulence encounters, tail strikes, minor runway excursions and other non-fatal events that can signal underlying risks.
Regulators and international organizations are also investing heavily in shared data platforms. Global safety reporting initiatives allow airlines and oversight bodies to pool anonymized reports and analysis, creating a much broader view of where risk is emerging worldwide. This has been particularly important in areas such as runway safety, controlled flight into terrain and loss of control in flight, which historically have been leading contributors to fatal accidents.
The IOSA framework complements these tools by requiring robust safety management systems and internal reporting cultures as part of its audit criteria. Airlines that meet IOSA standards are expected not only to respond to incidents, but to maintain processes that continuously collect, analyze and act on safety data. In a world where air traffic is rising fast, that shift from reactive to predictive safety management is one of the key reasons why many analysts believe the industry can achieve record-low accident rates even as the skies get busier.
Regional Challenges and the Push for a Truly Global Safety Net
Despite the positive long-term trends, global safety data still shows sharp regional disparities. While North America, Europe and parts of Asia-Pacific have achieved very low accident and fatality rates, other regions continue to battle higher incident levels, often due to infrastructure constraints, regulatory capacity issues or economic pressures that make fleet renewal and training investments more difficult.
Recent ICAO safety reports have highlighted that certain regions, notably in parts of Africa and some developing markets, experience significantly higher accident rates per million departures than the global average. These regions may account for a small share of total world traffic, but each accident there reinforces the imperative for more equitable access to safety know-how, resources and oversight. That in turn has spurred cooperative initiatives focusing on runway safety, controlled flight into terrain prevention, air traffic management modernization and state-level safety oversight support.
The expansion of IOSA and similar programs into these markets is an important piece of the puzzle. By encouraging and supporting airlines in emerging regions to join the IOSA registry, IATA and its members aim to spread best practices more widely and establish a consistent operational safety baseline. For passengers, the practical outcome is that flying on an IOSA-registered carrier in an emerging market increasingly offers a level of safety governance comparable to what they would find on a major North American or European airline.
As the industry looks toward 2025 and 2026, the push is not just to make flying safer on average, but to narrow these regional gaps. That is why safety campaigns focus as much on supporting regulators and airports in challenging environments as they do on refining procedures at large hub airports. A genuinely safe global system depends on all its parts, not just its strongest performers.
What This Means For Travelers: Reading Between the Lines on Safety
For most travelers, the mechanics of audits, safety management systems and accident rate calculations are far removed from the experience of booking and boarding a flight. Yet the shift toward global safety standards has very tangible benefits when you are planning international trips in 2025 and 2026. Choosing airlines that are IOSA-registered or have visibly strong safety cultures means you are aligning yourself with carriers that voluntarily open their operations to external scrutiny by international experts.
In mature markets such as North America, it is notable that major carriers like Southwest, Delta and Alaska not only meet national regulatory requirements but also maintain IOSA registration as a form of global benchmarking. In the Asia-Pacific region, Cathay Pacific and Air New Zealand play a similar role, pairing strong local regulatory oversight with adherence to the international operational safety standard. Porter’s decision to join this cohort signals that even mid-sized carriers competing in crowded markets see safety credentials as a core pillar of their value proposition.
Travelers do not need to know every detail of how an IOSA audit works to derive value from it. What matters is understanding that there is a transparent, rigorous and recurring process behind the scenes. Alongside that, the continued focus of industry and regulators on sharing data about incidents, turbulence events and emerging threats gives airlines more tools than ever to keep journeys uneventful for passengers.
As passenger numbers climb to new records, it is unlikely that news about aviation will ever be free of accident headlines. But set against the backdrop of tens of millions of annual flights, the combination of shared global standards, sophisticated data-driven safety management and expanding participation from carriers like Porter suggests that 2025 and 2026 will be years in which flying continues to grow safer, not more dangerous. For travelers, that may be the most important, if least visible, development in the post-pandemic era of air travel.