Flying -- even accounting for all the 737 Max crashes is still statistically by far the safest form of travel per unit of distance travelled -- the 737 Max is a blip just like 9/11.
And you can make it that much more safe by doing yourself a favor and avoiding the 737 MAX.
I have no idea, but I suspect they're all still orders of magnitude safer than driving.
The MAX has suffered hull losses at around 100x the rate per flight of baseline airline travel, so I suppose it's the most dangerous in your list.
The better measure is time: deaths per hour traveled. And by that measure buses are actually safest, followed by rail, then air [1][2]. Cars are still 4x more dangerous, but that's much less stark than the common wisdom. And even that is misleading because with cars specifically, there is much more variability of drivers, car quality, maintenance, etc. If you are sober, responsible, educated, with a well maintained car, etc. your odds are significantly lower. Think drunk drivers who only kill themselves in accidents (this is a significant portion of car deaths).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety
[2] http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_5_No_7_1_July_2015/15.p...
This kind of analysis assumes that the destination is independent of the mode of travel. We only consider going from NY to LA so often because plane travel makes it practical. But this doesn't map well to the general claim that "airplane is the safest way to travel". A per trip metric seems like a more accurate measure of this claim, but then bus is the safest.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comp...
I'm not sure why you think just doubling the speed would impact the crash/unit of distance ratio. If ten planes do a 600km trip and one crashes, that's 1 crash per 6000km regardless of the speed at which they're traveling.
You're right that fixed per-trip risks are diluted, but that's because plane trips are longer, not because they're faster. The right comparison, in my opinion, would be to draw the curves of death rate / trip length.
No, they really cannot. Jetliners can't even increase their speed by 20%, because that puts them through the sound barrier, which they can't handle. Planes must specifically be designed to handle that, like the Concorde or fighter jets. All planes currently used for civilian aviation cannot handle it.
Are you suggesting that people take a bus from New York to Los Angeles, because though the chance of being injured or killed is higher, it is worth it because the trip takes so much longer?
The concord was involved in single accident resulting in death or injury, which was not due to a fault of its own.
No, the Concorde was actually one of the least safest passenger aircraft in history, the least safest one on this list by a wide margin: http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
It had so few flights, yet one of them was a catastrophic loss that killed all on board. Just compare it with, e.g., the Boeing 747-400: the Concorde had one full loss in 90,000 flights. The 747-400 has had 0.5 full loss equivalents in 8,420,000 flights. The stats for many other planes are similar.
The Concorde really was quite dangerous. And you can't blame it as "no fault of its own"; it suffered tire blowouts at a rate 30X of other planes, which had previously caused punctured fuel tanks. A tire blowout caused the fatal crash.
In the US, some overwhelming majority of these accidents are alcohol-involved and (I believe) single-vehicle.