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Comment by t3rmi | Hacker News Reader

Recently my wife has been checking every flight we taking to ensure that its not Boeing.

I initially thought she was overreacting but based on what I’m seeing from Boeing here I have to thank her for her diligence.

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Much as I like the idea of punishing Boeing, this doesn't make any sense in terms of personal safety. Airliner crashes are so unlikely to kill you that, in terms of your own personal safety, it just isn't worth worrying about.

Before the 737 MAX maybe. As more and more glaring flaws are found -- and cause incidents -- this plane appears increasingly unworthy of trust.

No, what I said was correct. It simply isn't the case that avoiding Boeing airliners appreciably improves your personal safety.

Airliner crashes always make the news, so many casual observers overestimate their frequency by orders of magnitude. The statistics remain clear as day: airliner crashes are incredibly rare. They're incomparably rarer than road traffic accidents, for instance. Most years, no US airlines have any fatal crashes.

I recommend this YouTube video as a general overview of aviation safety. It's about the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash, but also covers airliner safety and big-picture aviation safety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpGl2_fVr2Y (Kobe Bryant Crash-- Risk by the Numbers)

Alaska Airlines Flight 1282

"The aircraft is a 737 Max 9 and received its certificate of airworthiness on October 25, 2023."

Wait until she hears about the Air France 447 crash, you’ll be taking buses everywhere.

accident statistics:

Boeing 737: 149 accidents

Boeing 747: 49 accidents

Airbus A300: 33 accidents

Airbus A320: 28 accidents

Boeing 737 NG / Max: 27 accidents

Edit for context (thanks /u/janice1999) there are 11,182 Airbus A320s and ~8400 Boeing 737 NG / Max so even pro rated Boeings recent planes are worse and the A320 has been out a few years longer too.

Is there data which shows accidents per flight?

edit:

I found some and put it into a Sheet for convenience of sort-ability.

As far as raw accident per flight data, only Concorde is worse than the Max series. Wow.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FTq3PwQMb83dnNtxwZoY...

http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

Fixed Sheet link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_TJgrH-3UtEI4oq3K3qt...

We'd probably also want to see separate stats for issues that occur shortly before landing or after takeoff -- stuff that may be more likely to come up with every flight regardless of duration.

You are correct. Apologies, prior to seeing your response I had updated my comment stating that, and also found some data.

Punch line: the 737-MAX has an accident rate 12x higher than the 737.

Stunning.

28.

Alaska Airlines Flight 1282

It's not really an apt comparison. There were a lot of factors which culminated in that crash.

The 737 MAX was an unsafe design which Boeing was aware of and failed to address.

Airbus’s human factor engineering was so bad that it led experienced pilots to fly a perfectly good aircraft into the ocean. They were repeatedly warned about this, and still have not fully fixed it.

On the other hand, there was Qantas flight 32:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...

Airbus’s flight controls worked sufficiently well that the pilots could still keep the plane in the air and then land it successfully despite the massive damage to the plane.

They acted on it. Wikipedia writes: "On 12 August 2009, Airbus issued three mandatory service bulletins, requiring that all A330 and A340 aircraft be fitted with two Goodrich 0851HL pitot tubes and one Thales model C16195BA pitot (or, alternatively, three of the Goodrich pitot tubes); Thales model C16195AA pitot tubes were no longer to be used."

The pitot tubes were not the root cause of that crash.

Yes, they were. They got stuck with ice and they disagreed in the air speed sent. Because of this the autopilot was disabled and the flight controls were switched in alternate law 2. The pilot that was flying failed to realise that this meant that his inputs had a much bigger effect compared to normal flight and he panicked and he also failed to relinquish control to the much more experienced pilot (on that model) multiple times. How are the pitot tubes not the root cause?

Malfunctioning pitot tubes do not cause an otherwise fine airplane to depart controlled flight.

The root cause was human factors.

Even then, they still fixed the tubes on all their planes. Seems only right, doesn't it?

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