Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

First being X months apart isn’t how you calculate risk. What matters is total failure over total flights and there’s a gap between the last crash and the fleet being grounded where that risk kept on going.

~2 years * 2 flights per day * 365 days per year * ~350 aircraft would be 511,000 flights but it’s / 2 because aircraft where being delivered over time that’s 2 crashes per ~255,000 flights or 1 per ~127,000. (Edit: Actual numbers were less than half that at 3 crashes per 1 million flights.)

By comparison someone living to 80 is 80 * 365 days = 29,200 days. Meaning the average day would be more than 3x as risky as taking a flight on a 737 Max. It’s not actually that simple as hospitalized patients are unlikely to fly, but you get plenty of elderly people dying from hart attacks etc on aircraft.

I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft, (edit: it beat the DC-8 and 707 which was still in use at the time) but general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours not flights. https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/data/Pages/GeneralAviationDashbo...

I don't think that's an apples to apples comparison at all. An elderly person dying of natural causes is a relatively unavoidable, normal death that just happens.

People dying because a plane crashes because of the negligence and penny-pinching of the airline manufacturer is no comparable at all.

What we want to compare is the crash/fatality rate of the 737 MAX during that period with rates for other aircraft types. And I suspect we'll find the 737 MAX falling far short of the standard if we do that.

> I don’t mean to suggest the aircraft was safe compared to other commercial aircraft

Right, but that's the only kind of comparison that really matters.

> general aviation in the US for example is 5.3 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours

We're talking about commercial airline safety. It's pretty well-known that general aviation is less safe, but that's not really relevant to the discussion.

I agree that I'm safer getting into a 737 MAX than I am into a buddy's Cessna or a car or train(?) or boat or whatever, but I don't care about that. If I've chosen to fly somewhere, I would prefer to fly on a plane with a better safety record than the 737 MAX.

> I would prefer to fly on a plane with a better safety record than the 737 MAX.

So, I’ll ask you which commercial aircraft have still in use have worse safety histories. If you’re being rational clearly you should be concerned with actual risks not just media reporting.

Not that I actually mean this as personal attack on you, it’s just the kind of irrationality I am referring to here.

Right, exactly. The 737 MAX mess is bad. But the numbers remain on the side of any cleared-to-fly jetliner, even including that situation, compared to almost any other form of transportation except maybe walking.

A car is dangerous because of traffic not because the front falls off (generally)

Current research shows ~850 people die in the US each year from mechanical failures in cars, but underperforming tires breaks etc contribute to far more.

The difference is we don’t do NTSB style investigations after a traffic accident.

The reasons we don’t do NTSB investigations is generally bc of what I said

"Traffic" is a controllable phenomenon, though. We know how to manage it and direct it to achieve our goals.

NTSB investigations of road fatalities, given teeth, would radically change how cars interact with one another.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com