Only two 737 MAX have ever crashed (both outside of the US), so the 3.08 figure is an extrapolation, not necessarily reality. After the software update it might have gone another 500K flights (or more) without a crash, leaving the figure at 2.0 (or smaller).
Let's say you need to travel from NYC to San Diego.
Let's assume a car death rate of 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles (a figure that popped up in Google). But that includes motorcyles and pedestrians, so let's play it safe and call it 1 death per 100 million miles.
By now we are comparing apples (chance of death by trip) to oranges (chance of death per mile traveled) but let's press on.
Distance from NYC to San Diego is 2,800 miles. So your chance of dying en route to San Diego is about 1 * 2,800 / 100,000,000 or ~30 in a million chance if using a car. Whereas with the MAX it is ~3 in a million (if you take a direct flight), or an order of magnitude more safe.
[1] I found 11 fatalities per trillion miles for planes, and 12.5 fatalities per billion miles for cars (in the US).
It's hard to find a good statistic that would make modes of transport comparable. But if I'd pick one I'd pick time spent (are 10 hours on a plane more or less safe than 10 hours in a car)
I'd be more interested in knowing where FATAL accidents occur, on the suspicion that most people do not live on highways and local streets are traveled at lower speeds.
edit: nvm I found it on wikipedia, for United Kingdom 1990–2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comp...
air/car deaths/h = 4.2x so... on this metric, not like "1000x safer"
That number confused me (I expected to be zero point something).
For the reference, the actual numbers in Wikipedia are: deaths per billion hours traveled: air = 30.8 ; car = 130
30.8 / 130 ~ 0.24
Take that 4.2/20 and you have 0.21. Or flip it around the 737 Max is 5 times more dangerous than a passenger car. That's drunk driver territory.
it’s rarely the CAR that kills you. It’s other drivers or your own negligence.
In the 737max case it’s Boeing that killed you.
Airplanes are faster than cars, and the average trip is longer. So, even if the pax fatality rate per distance is much better for aircraft (a factor of 200 to 1000, say), the fatality rate per trip is not that much better (a factor of 2 to 10, say).
Some more notes:
- That is for part 121 aviation (airlines). General aviation fatality rates are much worse (you're 15 times more likely to die in a small plane than in a car for the same distance, and 250 times more per trip...)
- An airliner also carries many more pax. The above numbers are per pax; if you base it per vehicle, then a plane is only about 5 times safer than a car for a given distance, and about 20 times more likely to crash than a car per trip.
- About 4% or so of all B747 or A300 ever built have been complete hull losses. (Newer planes are safer, presumably, but also haven't been around that long, so the statistics are not entirely trivial to compare.)
That doesn’t make a defective flight system a greater or lesser problem. It’s irrelevant.
Aggregate data is tough to interpret anyway for a cross country trip. Traffic deaths per 100M miles vary from 1.83 (South Carolina) to 0.54 (Massachusetts). Also, motor vehicle aggregate numbers include all trips — if you compare common carriers, busses and rail are dramatically safer than private cars.
Oh, I totally agree. I was just trying to put into perspective the fact that even defective flight systems are incredibly safe and that our fear of flying is often irrational...
That sounds like something lawyers would study rather than engineers.
compute it per hour traveled and see
So, with all the lag in getting the aircraft into service, its plausible that in the next 10 months the type could rack up 500,000 flights, since thats just a little more than 4 flights a day per aircraft on average.
I suppose someone with full access to data from e.g. FlightAware could try to see how many total logged flights there were.