Flying cheap airlines gives me the jitters, hence why I never use them. Aviation maintenance and other checks are not cheap, I just wonder just how much can you cut costs before they start to impinge on safety.
Let me interject my thought, having my wife and brother worked in the Airline industry (My wife used to work with Qantas and SAS) and my brother is an Boeing Engineer.
Most airline save cost by minimizing seat vacancy, if you can keep your aircraft fill 90 to 95%, you will half the operational cost for a single flight at 70%. Because pax vacancy not just impact on billing (ticket sales and so on) but it also associated to luggage space (especially when you charge per kg nowadays), fuel efficiency, maintenance cost per cycle and most important of all crew cost.
And the goal to achieve that number is a very good booking management system, and by rewarding early bird and punishing on gate ticket sale. If an airline can do that, or rather, "afford" to do that, then you will save a lot of money.
Notice that when I said "afford" I don't mean by cost, but also image and aircraft turnaround. For example, National Carrier usually will not do aggressive booking because it will damage their reputation (or else being called cheap) and Also, prime airline usually pride themselves with the constant scheduling, which don't allow flight to be delayed or cancel in favour of a more fully booked flight.
And then you get pay by service, maximum seating arrangement and minimal inflight service. Safety is usually maintain but anything else would just go. That's why Ryan Air can be that big simply because they are cheap, and you know they are cheap, and you expect no service on flight, and if you don't care about that to go from A to B, you will take a Ryan Air flight.
Since when Qantas and Etihad become top 10 cheapest airlines. My experience tells me a different story and take this listing with a grain of salt.
Not sure about Etihad, but majority of Qantas Group is budget airline. Qantas own Qantas Airways, QantasLink (Budget region airline), JetConnect (budget trans-Tasman airline), Jetstar (Budget regional/international airlines), Qantas also charter out QLink service to smaller contractor like Cobham Aviation.
If you count the fleet size, Qantas subsidiaries own twice as many aircraft than Qantas Airline themselves.
They have budget airline subsidiaries and budget routes.
Fair enough, but the incidence/accident rate is largely about the same for everyone when you do on per km/per passenger normalised basis....and still 1000's time safer than road travel at any stretch by same metric.
I would stay away from countries airlines that do not have strong legal framework (example a FAR-based aviation regime especially) however, esp for travel between or within such countries (given only developed countries do impose sanctions on their end)....budget airlines or not.
Safety is not controlled by the carrier nor the country that carrier registered in, but the standard is from ICAO, any A, B, C, D check you do in the world are the same and regardless of your airline status, Aircraft are mandated a maintenance regime that calculated based on the cycle, and if a company fail to do that, the airplane is then grounded.
There are no way for any airline, budget or otherwise to skip on safety checks, you can maximize the effective of aircraft between each cycle, unless you want to use an aircraft without registration, (which you cannot land in any reputable airport) budget airline would be going thru the same, if not more, safety check than other airline.
