In one of the best-known scenes in the film Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman's autistic character, Raymond, a fearful flier, is refusing to get on a plane to Los Angeles. His brother, played by Tom Cruise, attempts to persuade him to board by saying that all airlines have had a crash at some point, which doesn't necessarily mean that they are unsafe. Then Raymond offers, matter-of-factly, "Qantas. Qantas never crashed."
When Rain Man was released in 1988, the white kangaroo of the Australian carrier's logo was synonymous with safety. The airline's last fatal accident was in 1951, when a DHA-3 Drover crashed near the coast of Papua New Guinea, killing all seven on board. But that was before the jet age of the late '50s. Since then, Qantas' selling point has always been its reliability as the second oldest airline in the world and its pristine safety record.