To each their own, but the 737 NG (aka the models before the Max), the 747-400 / 747-8, and the 787 all have a lower number of fatal crashes per million flights than the Airbus A320 family and the A330.
The 737 has also been around a lot longer. The 737NG has a rate of 0.07 compared to the A32x's 0.09. The A330 is 0.19 while the 777 is 0.18. But even this is kind of misleading. All but three of the fatalities (total fatalities, not accidents) due to the 777 come down to intentional acts that would have destroyed any aircraft.
There are a ton of planes with a better flight/crash ratio.
380 A340 where build since 1991 almost exactly as much as the number of 737 Max built (376). Not one fatal accident in almost 20 years for the A340 versus 2 fatal accident in 2 years for the 737.
The 737 MAX actually had a really bad rate of fatal accidents per hour of flight. Like if you flew a certain number of hours per year on the 737 MAX prior to the MCAS fix you’d be more likely to die than if you drove for the same number of hours.
737 Maxes have flown more than a couple of million of flights, at least, since they entered service, that puts their fatal incident rate at similar levels of the A320.
The only two incidents, also, as you know, were related and both happened 5+ years ago.
The Boeing Max 8 entered service in May 2017. Assuming a linear deployment rate, the 350 planes in service have seen an average life of 10 months. Assume 4 flights/day, that's 420,000 flights so far. 2 have gone down. A best estimate of the likelihood that a plane goes down (MLE), p = X/n = 2/420,000 = 1/210,000 ~ Binomial(n=420,000, p=P(crash)). According to the Economist [1] the likelihood your plane goes down generally is 1/5,000,000. So based on the fact that the plane crashes had similar characteristics, the Boeing Max 8 is 25X more dangerous than a regular plane.
25X is the difference between surviving a commute on a bicycle vs a car [2].
EDIT: The Economist source that estimates a plane's p(crash) is questionable, for a passenger plane. If anyone wants to dig into this further, I found this source too: http://www.baaa-acro.com/crash-archives
That’s comparing apples to two sacks of apples, one of which is 30 years older.
The A320neo entered service in 2016 and has over 3,000 of the type in service and has zero fatal accidents involving passengers or flight crew (there have been five fatalities from two incidents involving runway incursions by ground crew). There have been no serious in-flight incidents.
The 737max was introduced in 2017 and has over 1500 in service, about half of the airbus A320 neo. It has had two fatal accidents resulting in 346 fatalities and one serious in-flight incident. The record is not great.
If you want to compare all 737 models back to the first flight of the A320 I’m pretty sure it’ll be closer, but flying is much safer than it was even with the 737max.
However I do believe that Boeing will resolve the issues. It will take time to fix the culture that resulted caused them though.
Someone did the stats around the max 8. 300 lives lost in 3 years of operation and 400 planes in the sky. It is actually quite dangerous to fly and much more dangerous than driving when you compare by travel time and not distance. In comparison, A320 Neo and 787 have no hull losses and there's more of those planes in the sky than the maxes. 787s have been flying for almost 10 years.
The point is that commercial aviation is so extraordinarily safe, that mechanical failures that result in fatalities are too rare to determine if a model with 5 million flight hours is more or less safe than another model with 500 million flight hours.
Zero fatalities does not mean the aircraft is statistically safer unless it has an order of magnitude more flight hours.
If you apply this reasoning to the MAX statistics, then you have to apply it to the statistics of all the other planes, too, which also received various changes and updates during their service lives improving their safety and you are back to square one, that is MAX is much less safe than other planes
What's the back of the envelope on whether the 737 Max is more dangerous than driving?
1,300 aircraft have been built since the first started flying in 2017, with two deadly crashes. I don't know how many miles those have accumulated, but presumably it's of order 4k miles per day per aircraft, and maybe 3 years (1000 days) of flying to date per aircraft on average, giving a very rough estimate of a few billion miles? So maybe a deadly crash per billion miles, in comparison to a bit over one deadly crash per 100M miles for cars.
...and in this case provably wrong - there have been (in the USA) just 2 deaths, in all of commercial aviation, since the 737-max was introduced in 2015 - thats 2 deaths in 9 years.
In the 9 years before (2014 back to 2006) that there were ~100 deaths, so 5000% higher deaths in the 9 years before the 737Max was introduced - and even that is very, very low historically.
(and for the record, not claiming the 737Max is directly responsible for those lower deaths, just that in general - and across the board - aviation has never been safer than it is now).
Counting absolute numbers makes no sense, in the long run any plane model will kill an infinite number of people; what matters is the rate - that is, the slope in that first graph - and the MAX8 has the steepest. As they write, "Compared to the planes involved in accidents with the most fatalities since 1966, the 737 Max 8 has had more fatalities in its first years in service than any of the other."
> statistically speaking, much safer than older aircraft generations. It surely does not feel that way, but incidents-per-flight, not to mention incidents-per-flight-hour and incidents-per-flight-mile, strongly disagree
777 enters that chat. Over the 30 year lifetime of the aircraft there have been a total of 242 fatalities excluding terrorism. The first major incident resulting in a hull loss, happened over 10 years after the aircraft was introduced.
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