The Daily Beast presents a nice guide to airline safety called How Safe Is Your Airline?

“Who among us gets to choose when we’ll die?” [professional-pilot-turned-writer William Langewiesche, one of the most articulate people I know on the subject of flying and air safety] asked. So why be any more afraid of flying than we are of crossing a street? Good point. But with whom you fly matters. The Daily Beast compared the global statistics for the 25 airlines with the best safety records and those with the worst, and the differences are striking. The chances of you being on a flight with at least one fatality are 10 times greater in the loser bucket. And the chance of you yourself dying? Twelve times greater.

The difference within the U.S., which has uniformly far safer standards, is far less.

[…]

Sorting through the data leads to all sorts of interesting factoids: Pilot errors have been getting fewer. The accident rate has been consistently lower than in the 1990s. Flying in a private jet is more than four times more dangerous than flying on a big carrier.

Then there’s location. “Where you are is more important than the model you’re in,” says Dr. Todd Curtis, the author of Understanding Aviation Safety Data and creator of AirSafe.com.

That makes sense. If you are on the ground…definitely safer than in the air. Spoiler alert: AirTran gets the nod for safety record, although it has only existed since 1997.