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.
> safest airliner ever built ... very low production numbers
If one model has 5 million flight hours and zero crashes, and another model has 500 million flight hours and 50 crashes, is it possible to say which model is safer?
Very unsafe? In the past 14 years there have been 72 fatalities involving US Air Carriers, out of around 250 million flight hours flown[1]. That’s fewer fatalities in 14 years than there are US motor vehicle fatalities in a single day (on average).
I believe it was zero deaths on commercial jets last year, but when comparing that safety record to these smaller craft, it's a category error. Light planes are generally less safe than commercial jets per miles traveled.
There are several airliners, including models from Boeing and Airbus, that have had no fatalities. But they are low production models like the A340. It's arguably impossible to come up with a "safest" if you don't have some way to account for the fact that 20 times as many 737NGs have been produced as A340s.
The interesting thing about statistics is it implies future behaviour based on past behaviour. Up til now commercial aviation has been remarkably safe, per passenger mile traveled. But it appears that Boeing has been shaving off safety procedures to get 737's out of the factory faster. And their suppliers have been similarly pressured, by all accounts. And the carriers don't come to this issue with clean hands, either.
So yes, up til now, commercial aviation has some good numbers. But we're also seeing door plugs fly off, tail assembly bolts improperly fastened, wheels falling off planes as they taxi around the runway, single points of failure on flight control software that cause aircraft to nose into the ground. These are the type of failures you wouldn't see 20 years ago (except for the MD-80, which was designed and manufactured by the same guys who took over Boeing in the 2000s.)
I'm not sure I want to wait to be a statistic. I'm happy to take the train.
It seems like this would be a pretty big hint that you're looking at statistics the wrong way. When a single fatal crash can make your airliner the 'most dangerous statistically' then perhaps that's not a good airliner to use in any kind of comparison because the number of total flights is way too low to be meaningful.
There are no reliable statistics for the safety of commercial air travel in the US these days.
It's not for lack of trying. It's simply that commercial air travel in the US is so safe that there isn't enough data to compile anything like a reasonable risk figure. Prior to the Asiana crash, the last fatal airliner crash in the US was in 2009, and there were no fatalities in 2008 or 2007.
So, yes, they're much safer than that number would imply, but it's hard to say exactly how much.
The fatal accident count is higher for GA, but I didn't normalize against flight hours or flights, just glanced at it.
I'm sure there's been a study somewhere that attempts to untangle all the factors that differ between commercial carriers and GA, to see which safety is most sensitive to -- continuous highly professional maintenance, highly trained and experienced crew, rigorous airliner certification regime, etc.
> 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.
Commercial aircraft are much safer than they ever were. In the 60s-80s there were typically just over 2000 fatalities per year. In the last decade typically under 1000 fatalities per year, despite the increase in passenger miles since the '80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...
And yet commercial airplanes, which have used this methodology for decades, are one of the most reliable mechanical systems humans have ever made. The mean-time-before-failure (MTBF) for component failures that impacted a 787 flight is ~40,000 hours [1] or about 4.5 flight-years per component failure, not full system failure, component failure. After nearly ~4,000,000 flight-hours there has not been a single full system failure or fatality yet in a 787 and this is only a fraction of the standard in aerospace so far. Between 2000 and 2010 there was ~1 death per 50 billion passenger-miles [2]. At an average speed of ~700 mph that would be 1 death per ~71 million passenger-hours or ~8150 passenger-years or ~125 airframe-years.
People who want to design reliable systems and processes look to airplanes for how to do that. That does not mean the same techniques are applicable or cost-effective in a different context, but at the very least the historical processes have been empirically demonstrated to produce extremely high reliability far beyond what nearly every other industry can attain and what many industries, such as commercial software, do not even attempt to achieve and may not even think is possible in their environment.
> Going by deaths per trip makes a flight about 3x more dangerous.
Do you mind sharing your back-of-the-napkin math? It seems wrong given the low probability of crash per airplane flight (e.g., there are about 100,000 flights daily and close to zero per day fatal crashes). In fact, about one fatal air crash happens every 7,000,000 airplane flights. I don't know anybody who knows anybody that has died in a commercial airplane crash. I had 2 friends that died in traffic accidents. Anecdotes aren't data, but no one would be surprised by these numbers.
According to Airline Reporter[1], per 100 million miles there are 1.33 deaths by auto, and .0077 deaths by commercial plane. Though it's over a limited amount of time...
just to nitpick,
but with airline travel about five or six nines (99.9999%) safe, that is, one fatality every million miles of travel or so, 95% vs 99% is nowhere near good enough.
(And the accidents that do occur on commercial flights are mostly small cargo planes... for major airlines that number would be more like 0.01 although it's hard to really get good numbers at that point because the numerator is so small... there are years when the US doesn't have a single fatal commercial passenger crash)
That's my point. Comparing the safety record to other commercial planes is kinda pointless, since so few were built and they were used so little (and even then, one managed to crash and burn). If the 737-MAX had seen the same use, I'm sure we'd never had uncovered the design issue that caused the crashes either.
And "any other commercial airliner" includes planes like the 787 and the A380, which have literally never had an incident with fatalities.
Zero fatalities does not mean the aircraft is statistically safer unless it has an order of magnitude more flight hours.
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