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Are you less safe on a 737 MAX than driving to the airport in a car? Genuinely curious, I’m trying to understand if this whole saga is statistically significant
by alpb 3y ago
Are you less safe on a 737 MAX than driving to the airport in a car? Genuinely curious, I’m trying to understand if this whole saga is statistically significant.
- EasyMark 3y agoI often use the same theory of "is this safer than my commute to work every day" for actuarial decisions in my life.
- xahrepap 3y agoI've heard a lot of people say this in these comment threads, and I think this glosses over the actual issue: safety is getting worse, not better or even staying the same. So it's MORE statistically significant than it was. The trend is heading the wrong way. Air safety going down is a trend you want to stop ASAP. Not wait around until it's just as dangerous as something else like driving your car.
- DennisP 3y agoThat's true, but the question might be whether you personally should be worried if you find yourself on a 737 Max.
- alrs 3y agoThe first worry as an American is having a pillar of your country's economy managed by incompetents.
- gruez 3y agoSounds a lot like "yeah sure, fear over 737 Max is overblown, but the fact that I was thinking about it in the first place says something about the current state of affairs". https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
- lotsofpulp 3y agoPeople are concerned because it seems irrefutable that there is corruption and a culture of cost cutting causing these issues. Incompetence is understandable, improperly modeling the physics due to lack of experience or knowledge is understandable, but repeated instances that point to corruption at the government regulator and bad culture at the manufacturer lend to fears that the situation will get worse for a while before it gets better. It’s the same reason you might avoid flying on an Eastern European/Russian airplane. The perceived risks move from unforeseeable error or bad luck to systemic error.
- alrs 3y agoIt sounds nothing like that. Boeing is going to lose deals because carriers don't want to deal with repeated groundings. The US economy will reflect that.
- flashback2199 3y agoIt doesn't matter. Nothing will change unless enough people begin voting with their feet.
- jen20 3y agoMany airlines allow same day changes. If everyone scheduled on a Max reschedules for alternative flights consistently, they'll get the message soon enough. Refusing to board a Boeing plane at all is perfectly reasonable at this stage.
- dkarl 3y agoThat's not true, and we'd get to a much, much worse place if we relied on that. The industry put the current system in place because it could see that airlines would make gruesome compromises if consumer choice was the only thing driving safety.
- flashback2199 3y agoWhat do you mean "if", anyone can choose what plane to fly on anytime.
- duxup 3y ago> Air safety going down Is it?
- psunavy03 3y ago[citation needed]
- stouset 3y ago> safety is getting worse, not better or even staying the same The only death in US major commercial aviation in ages was when a woman was partially sucked out of a window in 2018 when an engine failed and blew apart, breaking the window open. Before that, we have the Asiana flight which crashed after landing short at SFO, striking the undercarriage on the edge of the floating platform and cartwheeling. Everyone survived the crash, but a woman was killed when a fire truck ran over her amidst the firefighting foam. Prior to that we have to go to 2005 when a plane overran a runway and hit a car, killing one occupant… of the car. We have to go all the way back to November 2001 to have a serious accident where an American plane crashed on takeoff, killing all on board. Technically this was due to pilot error due to over-responding to wake turbulence, breaking off the vertical stabilizer. But it’s arguably an engineering issue that the pilot was able to induce catastrophic structural failure through control inputs. There has definitely been a worrying trend lately in operational error with pilots and ATC nearly causing accidents due to runway incursions, nearly landing on taxiways, etc. But it’s really hard to say with a straight face that major airlines have anything other than an exemplary safety record the likes of which has been completely unparalleled before now. We have had one single death aboard a major commercial aviator in the U.S. in more than twenty two years.
- flashback2199 3y agoThe only reason nobody was injured this time was nobody was sitting in the seats next to the door plug that blew off. The seat was destroyed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BizarreByte 3y agoYou're missing his point entirely. People are trying to make flying out as getting more dangerous, but that's factually incorrect.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> only reason nobody was injured this time was nobody was sitting in the seats next to the door plug This was a serious fuck-up. But it remains that there was at risk no more than one, maybe two, fatalities. That isn’t enough to justify the claim that “safety is getting worse.”
- legitster 3y ago> The trend is heading the wrong way. Contrary to this sentiment, air traffic safety continues to improve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_incidents#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden... If anything, air travel is so safe now that non-fatal incidents such as this weeks' stand out more than they would have in previous decades. And in comparison, driving is getting much more dangerous (at least in the US). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
- not-my-account 3y agoBut, we're seeing fatal issues with one specific company over and over again. Knowing that there is some systemic failure within Boeing must change your priors, no? What's wrong with pointing that out and being concerned?
- legitster 3y agoI have concerns, but not enough not to fly. Everything I do in life is a calculated risk. If you told me my toaster was 3 times as likely to kill me today I would still probably toast my bread knowing that the base rate was already pretty low. If anything, knowing that all of the headline grabbing incidents has been confined to one product line at one company, and watching the amount of scrutiny they are receiving for it makes me feel safer overall.
- nubb1nz 3y ago[dead]
- gruez 3y ago> But, we're seeing fatal issues with one specific company over and over again. Knowing that there is some systemic failure within Boeing must change your priors, no? "systemic failure within Boeing" isn't necessarily inconsistent with "air traffic safety continues to improve". For instance, better pilot training and safety regulations might make flying even safer despite Boeing creating more crashes.
- yreg 3y agoOkay, but I'm not sure fearmongering is the way to go. There are already people in this thread afraid of taking a flight in one of these machines.[0] My mother is terrified. A subthread about the actual personal risk when flying the MAX is perfectly valid. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38929336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38929336
- psunavy03 3y ago> My mother is terrified. This is more or less equivalent to the little old lady in this comic saying "I'm wearing this to ward off A." Laypeople are notoriously crap at judging any kind of risk. https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif
- jmward01 3y agoThat is a big statement. Since 2019 there have been 32 fatalities connected to commercial aircraft. Most of those were iv very small aircraft like seaplanes and helicopters. 32 deaths in 4 years compared to ~40k/year in cars. We need to keep things in perspective.
- omikun 3y agoTo keep things in perspective we should compare fatalities per person trips or person miles. Total deaths doesn't mean as much when a lot more people travel by car.
- stouset 3y agoWe do, and there has been one death due to an incident on a major U.S. airline since November 2001. You can maybe argue two, where a woman was killed after exiting an Asiana plane after it crashed at SFO. She was hit by an emergency vehicle responding to the scene.
- sokoloff 3y agoAsiana is not in the set of "major US airlines". Separately, major US airlines can reliably fly a daytime visual approach with a fully working airplane into a major airport.
- hardcopy 3y agoeh. To a certain extent you should compare based on distance traveled, maybe. But total miles driven in the USA are quite high compared to other countries. Lots of driving simply doesn't need to happen, but occurs because we induce it by the way we design the places where we build. I don't really care how safe driving is per mile, I care if I'm going to be dead at the end of the year.
- ibejoeb 3y agoEthiopian Airlines Flight 302, a MAX, crashed in 2019, killing 157 people.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> safety is getting worse Record passenger miles flown [1] with years of zero fatalities since, I believe, 2020 [2][3] refutes this hypothesis. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPM https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPM [2] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-carriers/ https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca... [3] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-carriers/ https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
- xahrepap 3y agoMy point is: the wall blew out. That’s never happened before. We should not allow this to be okay because no one died this time. Overall statistics improving doesn’t mean you have permission to start throwing a random person off the plane every year. There’s an xkcd about an online seller and a bobcat…
- michaelsshaw 3y agoIf any other mode of transportation were nearly as dangerous as roadways in the US, it would be made illegal. The fact is that the 737 MAX has, by its own flaws, killed hundreds of people in recent memory. People don't want to deal with this clearly cursed line of airplanes at all.
- bigfishrunning 3y agoI also think comparing air travel to car travel is a bit unfair -- it's better to compare air travel to Bus travel (the driver has a CDL) or Train travel (The engineer is specially trained) Car fatalities likely dwarf bus and train fatalities too. It's not that airplanes are particularly safe, it's that cars are particularly unsafe.
- panick21_ 3y agoSafety in road transportation has gotten a lot worse. Specially if you don't surround yourself we a new high tech 2-tons of steel. Being fucking murder by a car when walking is way more dangerous.
- stouset 3y agoThe MAX is far safer than driving at this point.
- alpaca128 3y agoWhen issues are repeatedly found for years the question is not whether a few planes with loose bolts are still safe in theory, but how many other issues weren't discovered yet that may be far worse. This isn't just a single mistake that could happen to anyone and it's clearly not limited to a single category of flaws - if they messed up with tightening bolts, messed up the software and also forgot tools in fuel tanks etc, in what areas can Boeing still be trusted?
- stouset 3y ago> in what areas can Boeing still be trusted Look at the data. Over more than 22 years of flying in the U.S. we've seen one fatality aboard a major carrier. That one, single fatality was caused by an entire engine rapidly disassembling itself mid-flight. The engine mostly—but sadly not entirely—contained this failure. That engine was not designed or built by Boeing, but by CFM. The next prior fatality aboard a major carrier was when an Airbus A300 crashed on takeoff in Nov 2001, killing on on board. The pilot overreacted on the controls, causing catastrophic failure of the vertical stabilizer. The last time we saw a fatality in the U.S. due to a design and/or engineering error of a Boeing plane was in 1996 when a 747's center tank exploded due to a short circuit. Globally, Boeing and Airbus don't have meaningful differences in their track record of safety. Both have had experinced design and engineering flaws. Both have worked to fix those flaws. Should we accept the ongoing regulatory capture in the U.S.? Of course not. Should we continue to hold these companies accountable for improving their designs every time an incident like this happens? Of course, and we do.
- Sirizarry 3y agoWhat isn’t significant about Boeing consistently failing in the construction and quality of the 737 MAX? How does comparing it to driving to the airport prove anything? Scratch that, it proves nothing. What are you getting at?
- bostonsre 3y agoMaybe that it would be interesting to know what the numbers actually are. There is the common saying that you are more likely to get in an accident on the way to the airport than traveling on the plane, but knowing what the likelihood of both of those as well as the likelihood of an accident on a max could show this all to be hysteria or actually well founded.
- j-bos 3y agoVoting with wallets to counter negative trend in an industry made safe by regulations written in blood, seems more reasonable than hysterical.
- bostonsre 3y agoBut we can't be sure unless we know the actual stats. A lot of news operates by driving sensational stories, the more hysteria and doom they invoke, the more views they get. Are we talking 1% more likely or 0.00000001% more likely to get in an accident?
- Sirizarry 3y agoTake it like this: If you have to ride share and you hear that a common car used by drivers of Uber is having an increased failure rate, not passing inspections and have been temporarily banned from being on the road until more is learned; I think a pretty fair response is to try and avoid entering that car regardless of the ratio of incidents when driving that car, and when biking to the dealership to get it
- gruez 3y ago
- KerrAvon 3y agoYou are almost certainly safer on a 737 MAX than in a car, but that’s a low bar met easily by any modern commercial aircraft.
- Gare 3y agoBut "a car" is not really a fair comparison, it's usually "my car with me as a driver". Because I'd bet driving risk varies much more than flying.
- gruez 3y agoSee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918665 I didn't bother calculating the rate for driving to the airport, but eyeballing the figures for cars, it's probably as about as dangerous if you assume that the 737 Max were 10x more dangerous than average flying. Cars are still more dangerous than planes on a per-mile basis, but at the same time you're also traveling less miles on the car trip compared to the flight. Regardless if you hit a 5 minute traffic jam, you'd lose about the same amount of life as flying in a 737 Max (again, assuming it's 10x more dangerous than regular air travel).
- andygates 3y agoI'm really not sure you can amortize deaths like that to individuals. Folks are dead or they're not.
- function_seven 3y agoAnd the door either has a goat or a car. But before the event takes place (opening the door), it is perfectly reasonable to do risk analysis with odds and fractional goats. Chances of dying because you flew on a MAX are still insanely low. Maybe worse than if it was an A320, but the absolute numbers have so many zeros between the decimal point and the value that they're basically the same: 0.
- gruez 3y agoYes you can. People take minuscule amounts of risk everyday, by driving or even walking. While I agree there's a point where the risk isn't worth it even if the expected value is positive (eg. russian roulette to win a billion dollars), but we're nowhere near that point with 737 Max risk.
- deelowe 3y agoWhy would I care about per mile stats? What matters to me is the safety of the contraption and crew I'm putting my faith in each time I step foot into the machine. Airplanes shouldn't get a higher safety rating simply because the trips are 100x longer on average.
- pokstad 3y agoThere’s probably more people worried about the 737 than are worried about the imperfect autopilot in their cars.
- chrsig 3y agoThere are some of us that are just as worried about the 737 as the imperfect autopilot in others cars :)
- justapassenger 3y ago[dead]
- cjdell 3y agoVoting with your wallet is a thing. It's the only feedback that matters to these people.
- teeray 3y agoFallacy of Relative Privation in this case. The correct question is: “Are you less safe on a 737 MAX than any other commercial aircraft?” The answer to this question for a properly functioning airline industry should always be “no.” Given the recent incidents, the answer to this question is, unfortunately, “yes.”
- parkererway 3y agoDoesn’t the answer to that question have to be less for all but one airframe? Genuinely - trying to understand the point here.
- teeray 3y agoDepends what you measure. To keep things grounded in reality we can use measures involving “things about planes that airline customers universally consider bad”: the number of people killed by a model or the number of passenger items ejected from the plane during the flight.
- StreetChief 3y agoIt's really that simple.
- flkiwi 3y agoI would hop on a MAX right now and be perfectly happy about it. That’s not to say I don’t hope we get some good lessons from this event, but this could end up being a contractor maintenance issue rather than a manufacturing flaw, for example. Given the MAX series is flying many, many routes per day without incident, I wouldn’t make any decisions to, say, avoid a particular plane based on this incident.
- daedalus_j 3y agoIt's significant because it exposes that Boeing's assembly/QA process is not as bullet-proof as it was in the past. Assuming things work the way they should, this (combined with the other loose-bolts situation that recently happened) should trigger that process to be tightened up, much like the earlier crashes triggered a bunch of pilot training to make sure everyone was aware of the changes in the MAX. But it's not at all a sign that Boeing planes are at risk of falling out of the sky onto your house. You're still safer on the plane than you are in your car, statistically speaking. Something I find interesting is that this plane, with the door-sized hole in it, took the extra ~10 minutes required to run all the checklists to do a maximally safe landing before coming back in. The videos of the plane flying with a hole in it are interesting, there's a flight attendant standing talking to the people seated near the hole. If I understand correctly, this video seems to make the case that this event wouldn't actually have happened at cruising altitude, where the depressurization blast would've been worse, which is also interesting to know. https://youtu.be/WhfK9jlZK1o?si=g2QDFWSgEwkGvuiS https://youtu.be/WhfK9jlZK1o?si=g2QDFWSgEwkGvuiS
- mihaaly 3y agoMost accidents occur to people close to or inside their home. They should stop worry about airplanes and traffic accidents altogether! :-)
- JohnFen 3y ago> Are you less safe on a 737 MAX than driving to the airport in a car? I don't think that's a meaningful comparison. The 737 MAX problems are related to the airplane itself. The dangers of driving are mostly related to the performance of the drivers, not the cars themselves.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jessriedel 3y agoIf you estimate the risk by just taking the number of fatal crashes and dividing by the number of miles traveled by all 737 Max'es, it's roughly 10x safer per mile than car. (And almost certainly more dangerous than cars per trip rather than per mile.) > 1,300 aircraft have been built since the [737 Max] first started flying in 2017, with two deadly crashes. I don't know how many miles those have accumulated, but presumably it's of order 4k miles per day per aircraft, and maybe [1.5] years ([500] days) of flying to date per aircraft on average [in light of delivery dates and extensive groundings], giving a very rough estimate of a [~2] billion miles? So maybe a deadly crash per billion miles, in comparison to a bit over one deadly crash per 100M miles for cars. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38895004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38895004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38895077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38895077
- bagels 3y agoCars are getting safer all the time. It's okay to drive the car where the airbag has been replaced with a spike.