"Survival rates are averages taken in the past" was a reassuring refrain in the context of terminal illness and risky surgery, with the assumption that survival rates improve over time.
But the same words also apply to air travel, without the same assumption.
What am I missing?
Statistics collected over decades don't apply when circumstances change.
If Boeing safety reached critical tipping point recently, we are can talk only in 1 in tens of millions safety at best. There are less than 20 million commercial Boeing flights per year. 737 MAX flies only fraction of those.
I think the older Boeing planes through 737-900 are as safe as ever. 737-MAX+ and 787 seem to be where the design process went awry. Even then, there seem to be known workarounds to the bugs.
For what it's worth, I still fly on them all, I just remember to tell my family I love them before takeoff when the safety card has MAX on the label.
That’s Boeing’s new business. Bringing families together by threatening them with death by giant fireball!
This feature was added for people who wanted to avoid newer Boeing models, for context. Nobody cared what model they flew before the 737 max.
If you choose to fly Ryanair on the route instead, you are almost certain to get a Boeing 737.
If you care enough then you have to vote with your wallet, it's the only say you have.
Edit: In the last decade, in the US, about 2 people have been killed from aviation, and 365,000 people from car crashes.
What I mean is: people in general feel more comfortable having some form of control. Autopilot is fine until autopilot stops working, and then you want to have a method of taking over as pilot. In a plane where you have a hurt sense of confidence in the plane's integrity, it would be easy to imagine increased anxiety for people because they have no control; all they can do is sit in their seat and try not to panic. That's hard for some people, if not everyone. Especially in a situation where the plane is actively malfunctioning.
I don't think model of airliner fits that definition.
Like worrying about your Boeing flight while you drive to the airport, over 150,000x more likely to die on said drive :)
If you enter a car, your chance of dying on that trip is lower vs. when you enter a plane.
This is not true, you are still tens of thousands of times more likely to die.
Like, based on your simple frequentist argument, should Boeing be above FAA scrutiny? Let's just tell the FAA to spend more time on reforming car culture, too? People shouldn't bother voting with their feet?
See figures 3 and 4:
https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/Part121AccidentSurviv...
Instead you’re being driven by your gut and what you want to feel is true. No, sorry, air travel is wildly safer than essentially every other form of transportation available to you by essentially every single metric. The majority of even serious aircraft accidents are survived by the majority of occupants.
Hell, a Boeing crashed at SFO a few years back. It landed short of the runway and cartwheeled. Two people died from the crash because they hadn’t been wearing seat belts. A landing Airbus in Tokyo sliced through a coast guard plane just the other month. The coast guard plane was fucked, but zero people died aboard the passenger jet. This is the norm for commercial aviation accidents.
These aren’t the incidents that come to mind for you and that’s understandable. But it is wrong.