Your math seems a little off there, or maybe just a typo--I get slightly under 1 in 10,000--but you are correct that the 737 Max crash rate (~1 in 250000) is much worse than other contemporary airliners. In fact the only modern airliner with a worse crash rate was the Concorde.
I'm not trying to defend the 737 Max or Boeing, I'm just trying to point out that even a plane which is dramatically worse than any other active airliner is still, in absolute terms, very very safe. Our safety standards are incredibly high and we are absolutely justified in enforcing those standards, but people shouldn't be scared to fly on the 737 Max when it comes back into service.
Did you actually run the numbers? The 737 MAX statistics are abysmal [1]. It stands at 3.08 crashes per million flights, compared to 0.06 for the 737 NG. It's two orders of magnitude worse. Are cars really two orders of magnitude more dangerous than planes?
I'm not going to comment on how it compares to other planes but it's certainly significantly less safe than the previous generations of 737:
> a fatal accident rate of four accidents per million flights, whereas the previous Boeing 737 generations averaged 0.2 fatal accidents per million flights
Actual accident rates don't appear to back that up; accident rates (per million flights) are drastically higher for both the original 737 and 737 Classic versus the 737 NG: http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
One year ago I did a back of the enveloppe calculation and found that the Boeing 737 Max was two orders of magnitude less safe than other modern airliners. A320 and 737NG have fatal crashes to the tune of one per 10 million flights, while the 737 Max was crashing at about one per hundred thousand flights.
Flying nowadays is indeed amazingly safe. Boeing really dropped the ball on that one.
The 737 MAX has crashed 2 times in 800,000 flights - >100M passengers.
The industry average for plane crashes is 1 in 16.7M flights. The 737 MAX is 1 in 400,000.
This seems a lot worse than most people are making it out to be on here. It's close to 2 orders of magnitude worse than the industry average.
And if I'm doing my math right, you have a higher chance of dying getting aboard a 737 MAX than you do getting in your car (obviously, you're going to travel A LOT farther on the MAX than you would on an average car trip - so per mile it's still significantly safer than a car).
They never had a crash on any of their newer models, A380, A350 and neo variants.
The vast majority of flights are performed in 737s and A320 variants and the crash rate is 0.09 for Airbus vs 0.24 for Boeing.
[edit]: actually excluding planes produced before the 737NG in 1984 and the 737 max, the 737 crash rate is 0.11 which is still slightly higher than Airbus.
From inception to the second crash, numbers were abysmal. The 737 Max was crashing at a rate of about one per hundred thousand flights, two order of magnitude worse that the 737 NG (one fatal crash per 10 million flights).
Said differently, the Max 8 was working safely 99.999% of the time, while the 737 NG was working safely 99.99999% of the time. An order of magnitude better than 99.99%, but two orders of magnitude worse than expected...
It is certainly a lot safer now. Hopefully even better than the 737 NG.
If you're on a 737-max-anything, then worry a _tiny_ bit, otherwise, no. All their other planes have excellent safety records.
For comparison, Russia had a 2.29 fatal accidents/million departures safety rating in 2021, which is terrible, worst of all operating regions.
737-maxes had a 3.08 in 2019 when they got grounded. Every other plane in North America is averaging about 0.20 right now.
Granted, the 737-max's stat is based on a fairly low number of crashes. Regardless, the odds of a fatal crash are still vanishingly low on any given trip.
Roughly: There have been about 400 737MAXes produced over two years, average time in service 1 year, so figure 400 plane-years. Figure about 8 flight hours per day, so 3658400=1.2 million flight hours, 600,000 flight hours per accident or 1.5 fatal accidents per million hours.
The U.S. motor vehicle accident rate is about 1.2 fatalities per 100,000,000 vehicle miles travelled. Figure a car's average speed is 30mph so 1.2 fatalities per 3.3 million hours = 0.36 fatalities per million hours. Therefore on an hourly basis, the 737MAX is very roughly 5x more dangerous than driving. OTOH the 737MAX averages about 400mph, so per mile it's probably something like 2-3x safer.
The plane still crashed twice which is many many times higher than the non-purely-human-cause crash rate of other airplane types. Probably even then 737 MAX is still safer overall than cars, but airplanes have a higher safety expectation than cars do.
'If you flew, say, 10 times a year rather than 365.25, all on the 737 Max, it's a fraction of a percent chance.'
This works out to around 0.2% (1 in 2000) which is spectacularly poor odds for modern aviation where the typical risk of a crash on a single commercial airliner is around 1 in 5 million (less than 1 in 100 000 for 10 flights per year over 50 years - so basically 50 times less safe).
If you estimate the risk by just taking the number of fatal crashes and dividing by the number of miles traveled by all 737 Max'es, it's roughly 10x safer per mile than car. (And almost certainly more dangerous than cars per trip rather than per mile.)
> 1,300 aircraft have been built since the [737 Max] 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 [1.5] years ([500] days) of flying to date per aircraft on average [in light of delivery dates and extensive groundings], giving a very rough estimate of a [~2] billion miles? So maybe a deadly crash per billion miles, in comparison to a bit over one deadly crash per 100M miles for cars.
I was going to try to tell you that airplanes are extremely safe, that two highly publicized crashes in 8 months should be compared to a far larger number of unsurprising, non-newsworthy auto crashes...but there are only 330 total 737 Max planes flying, and two have crashed. Those aren't the numbers I expected.
Please don’t read this as a defense of Boeing, especially the MAX series aircraft, but from a flyer-safety standpoint the statistics show most Boeing aircraft in operation today are extremely safe.
The post-200 series 737s, not including the MAX, have some of the largest accumulated flight miles and lowest incident rates of any aircraft ever. The 777 and 747-400 also have exceptional safety records. Even the aging 757 and 767 fleets have only slightly higher rates. The 787, though relatively newer and with plenty of documented early issues has had no passenger fatalities that I’m aware of.
737 MAX crash rate is 3.08 per million.
Vs 0.1 for the other 737 models, so it's about 30X less safe.
http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
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