SriLankan Airlines

Is SriLankan Airlines safe?

Yes. In its whole history, first as Air Lanka and then as SriLankan, the airline has never had a fatal accident or lost an aircraft in an accident. Every jet it has written offHull lossAn accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. People may or may not be hurt.More in the glossary was destroyed in an attack during Sri Lanka's civil war. It is IOSA-registeredIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary, ICAO's last audit of the Sri Lankan regulator (2018) scored 88%, and no Sri Lankan airline is on the EU Air Safety ListEU Air Safety ListThe European Commission's list of airlines banned or restricted from flying in EU airspace because they do not meet international safety standards.More in the glossary. The weak spot is landings: its aircraft have veered towards the runway edge four times since 2018. Add an airspeed emergency over Indonesia in 2025 and an engine shortage that grounded much of its narrowbody fleet, and we score it 79.

Why its only losses were attacks

On 3 May 1986, a bomb hidden in the spare-parts kit of an Air Lanka Lockheed TriStar exploded at Colombo as passengers boarded for the Maldives. Fourteen people died. The Sri Lankan government concluded that the Tamil Tigers had planted it.

Fifteen years later, on 24 July 2001, Tamil Tiger fighters attacked Colombo's airport and the air force base beside it. They destroyed two SriLankan A330s, an A340 and an A320, all parked and empty, and damaged two more. The dead were rebels and servicemen, not passengers or crew. The war ended in May 2009.

We describe these events but do not count them in the accident score, the same way we treat sabotage everywhere on the site. Nor do we count a passenger who died in 2005 after a maintenance vehicle hit the boarding steps at Colombo: falls while leaving a parked aircraft are not accidents under our rules.

Inside our 20-year window, the worst damage happened on the ground and on the runway. On 9 January 2008 at Frankfurt, an A340 was pushed back before the jet bridge had been removed, and the bridge ripped open its fuselage, reportedly over 14 metres. On 2 July 2013, another A340 landed hard at Colombo and struck its tail, with substantial damage but no injuries.

What has gone wrong in the last ten years?

Nothing fatal, but there is a pattern in how crews handled the last few hundred feet of an approach.

In the Colombo case, the final report (February 2025) said the crew misjudged the deviation and did not go around, and listed a "lack of flight deck leadership" by the captain among the causes. Neither pilot filed a report; engineers found four damaged tyres. The investigators noted that the 2019 Singapore crew had not reported their excursion either. A 2021 altitude loss of about 1,540 feet on a flight to Sydney came to light only through the airline's routine flight-data monitoring.

Two other events point at crew conduct and dispatch decisions. In September 2024, a captain locked the first officer out of the cockpit on a flight from Sydney; the airline grounded the captain, who later resigned. On 5 June 2025, an A320 bound for Singapore was dispatched with the first officer's pitot heater inoperative, which the minimum equipment list allowed. Over Indonesian waters the airspeed readings became unreliable, the autopilot dropped out, and the crew received overspeed and stall warnings before declaring a Mayday and diverting to Medan. The investigation is still open.

Sri Lanka's investigators publish blunt final reports on these events. We found no fines or enforcement actions against the airline.

Does the engine shortage affect safety?

Mostly it affects reliability. SriLankan flew 23 leased Airbus aircraft in February 2026: A330s on long routes, A320s, A320neos and A321neos on regional ones. From 2023 it could not get enough of the neos' CFM LEAP engines back from overhaul. In February 2023 the aviation minister told parliament that "for several months we have not had the money to fix the engines." Nine aircraft were on the ground in April 2024.

In November 2025 the minister said six LEAP-powered jets had been grounded for a combined 131 months, and one was still not flying. The airline added a leased, 13-year-old A330-200 in June 2025, its first widebody addition in seven years, and in February 2026 the deputy minister said it needed at least seven more aircraft. Money is the constraint. SriLankan lost about Rs 2.7 billion in 2024/25, restructured its government-guaranteed bonds in March 2026, and the government has not settled how to reform it. A new acting chief executive started in September 2026.

No investigation we read has a maintenance finding tied to this. But older A320ceos and A330-200s stay in service longer, and SriLankan publishes no average fleet age, so the fleet scores 68, not the 80s of a young Gulf fleet.

Flying SriLankan through the monsoon and the Gulf

Colombo is a tropical airport on the wet west coast. The southwest monsoon brings rain from May to September, and afternoon thunderstorms are most common in the inter-monsoon months of March–April and October–November. Weather shows in the record: the 2024 excursion involved a crosswind that switched sides, suspected hail shattered both windshields of an A330 climbing out of Colombo in September 2021, and in June 2026 lightning struck an A330 climbing out for Sydney and caused an engine fault, so the crew turned back.

The Gulf is the bigger variable in 2026. SriLankan halted its Middle East flights at the end of February when airspace closed during the war with Iran. Riyadh and Dubai flights restarted on 9 and 10 March, and Kuwait returned on 8 August. In October 2026 EASA still had conflict-zone bulletins in force for the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

• On Gulf routes, check your flight close to departure. Schedules there have changed at short notice since February.
• Expect aircraft swaps. With few spare aircraft, a delay or a change of type is more likely than at a larger airline.
• Keep your belt fastened on approach to Colombo in the inter-monsoon months and the southwest monsoon, when thunderstorms and gusty crosswinds are common.

For the country, see our Sri Lanka page.

How we scored it

The accident record (92) is the strongest part: no fatal accident in its history, held below the top band because SriLankan is a small airline and two A340s were badly damaged in 2008 and 2013. Oversight (80) rests on IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary, a clean EU record and ICAO's 2018 audit. Incidents (62) carry the four landing excursions and the unreported events, and fleet (68) the engine groundings. Compare Thai Airways at 77 and Oman Air at 84.