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As another commenter stated, you can mince statistics any way you want to paint any picture you want. Only two 737 MAX have ever crashed (both outside of the U
by umvi 7y ago
As another commenter stated, you can mince statistics any way you want to paint any picture you want.
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.
- Xixi 7y agoIndeed I looked into it a little bit more and found that planes are about three orders or magnitude safer than cars [1] (fatality per miles traveled). So even assuming that the MAX is two orders of magnitude less safe than the 737 NG (based on limited data), it would still be an order of magnitude safer than traveling by car. [1] I found 11 fatalities per trillion miles for planes, and 12.5 fatalities per billion miles for cars (in the US).
- ulfw 7y agoBut how does travel per million miles make sense? Nobody decides to fly from Singapore to Sydney or drive. It's just not comparable. 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)
- WWLink 7y agohttps://www.esurance.com/info/car/where-car-accidents-happen-most https://www.esurance.com/info/car/where-car-accidents-happen...
- PunksATawnyFill 7y agoI find the whole "most accidents happen within X miles of home" argument so tired. That's like saying "most electrons are found within the vicinity of their nuclei." 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.
- swfsql 7y agoIf someone has crash statistics for planes/cars by time spent in a plane/car, please ping me to it! I'm super curious edit: nvm I found it on wikipedia, for United Kingdom 1990–2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comparisons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comp... air/car deaths/h = 4.2x so... on this metric, not like "1000x safer"
- acqq 7y ago> air/car deaths/h = 4.2x 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
- swfsql 7y agoYou're right, I got it the other way around; car/air deaths/h = 4.2x
- Gibbon1 7y agoI saw a statitic that the 737 Max is around 4 deaths per million miles. Vs 0.2 for the 737 NG. So 20 times more. 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.
- ulfw 7y agoYep. And the sad thing is: 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.
- kansface 7y agoJust considering safety, per trip is what I personally care about - the total odds I will die going by plane or by car. Often, this means flying through a hub which we would not visit by car so the numbers would be really hard :-/
- FabHK 7y agoI ran some numbers a while ago. 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.)
- Spooky23 7y agoStatistically, you’re more likely to choke and asphyxiate on your dinner than to die in a plane crash. 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.
- umvi 7y ago> That doesn’t make a defective flight system a greater or lesser problem. It’s irrelevant. 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...
- a3n 7y ago> As another commenter stated, you can mince statistics any way you want to paint any picture you want. That sounds like something lawyers would study rather than engineers.
- Iwan-Zotow 7y agowho cares about miles? compute it per hour traveled and see