Skytrax has announced the winners of the 2014 Airline of the Year Awards. Let's take a look at the top 20 rankings.

Congratulations to Cathay Pacific, headquartered in Hong Kong, for taking the top spot—that's impressive! I haven't flown with Cathay much myself, so my impression isn't very deep. I did write a flight review on Flight CX543 from Haneda to Hong Kong back in the day; looking back at it, I realized I didn't mention much about the service. I guess my attention was focused entirely on the route and taking photos, which is a real pity.

Looking at these rankings, it feels like the service level of Asia-Pacific airlines is miles ahead of the rest of the world. The top 9 are all Asian companies, and 17 out of the top 20 are from the Asia-Pacific region. That's truly surprising.

Additionally, Taiwan's EVA Air and mainland China's Hainan Airlines made the list. As a Chinese person, I feel quite proud; I definitely need to experience their service if I get the chance in the future.

Last year's champion, Emirates, dropped to 4th place. This brings to mind recent news about them returning A380s; I wonder what problems they are facing in their operations.

I've flown with ANA (All Nippon Airways) quite a bit and didn't feel their service level had declined. They dropped two places from 4th last year—perhaps it's related to the string of 787 failures last year?

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