Airbus A320 family (A319/A320/A321) — safety record, routes and airlines

The Airbus A320 family (A319/A320/A321) has 296 occurrences in our most recent five-year window. It has 64 hull losses and 1,236 recorded occurrences in total. 28 of them were fatal, the most recent in 2026. These are counts from the public record, not a rating: they reflect how widely a type flies as much as how it performs, and they do not predict any individual flight. The methodology page explains how we count.

Fuselage length and seat count. The A318 is the shortest at around 107 seats (rarely used today), then the A319 at about 124 to 156, the A320 at 150 to 180, and the A321 at 180 to 240. All share a common type rating, which means pilots trained on one can fly any of them with only short differences training. Systems and cockpits are nearly identical.

Very rarely. A small number remain in service for niche operations, but the variant never sold in volume and most have been retired. Air France and British Airways previously used the A318 for specialty city-pair flying, but those configurations are no longer regularly scheduled. Most passengers will never fly one.

Because the common type rating lets one pilot pool fly multiple sizes, airlines can match aircraft size to demand on each route without multiplying training and operational cost. A thin route gets an A319, a medium route gets an A320, a busy trunk or long leg gets an A321. That flexibility is a major structural advantage of the family.