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Comment by ptero | Hacker News Reader

For an opposite view: I have no relationship with Boeing, but I fly about once a month and have no issues flying on 737 Max, alone or with a family.

Current aircraft and flying is very safe. Even with the recent 737 fiascos, flying those is by far safer than driving to work. If I am OK with taking a road trip on vacation I am OK with flying Max.

This is not to say that improvements, re-certification and additional pilot training are bad. But from a purely practical point of view (which I try to practice for routine decisions), if we want to improve safety, there are better areas to spend $$ and / or hours than on endless re-polishing of a system that is super safe already. Life is dangerous; estimate your micro-deaths and extract most utility and fun from each of our 1e6 microlifes. My 2c.

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> Even with the recent 737 fiascos, flying those is by far safer than driving to work

I can't find the numbers easily right now, but I'd really like to see "deaths / person-hours flown on a 737 Max" vs. "deaths / person-hours driven".

Should be "deaths / person-miles" when comparing to driving.

I don't think it should, because if I didn't fly to the other side of the world for a holiday then I wouldn't replace that journey with a drive of the same number of miles.

Besides, when people describe flying as "safer than driving", the implication is that you're more likely to end up dying one way than the other. So any measure of "deaths per x" (x is miles, hours, or whatever) needs to be followed with "typical x per lifetime".

Roughly: There have been about 400 737MAXes produced over two years, average time in service 1 year, so figure 400 plane-years. Figure about 8 flight hours per day, so 3658400=1.2 million flight hours, 600,000 flight hours per accident or 1.5 fatal accidents per million hours.

The U.S. motor vehicle accident rate is about 1.2 fatalities per 100,000,000 vehicle miles travelled. Figure a car's average speed is 30mph so 1.2 fatalities per 3.3 million hours = 0.36 fatalities per million hours. Therefore on an hourly basis, the 737MAX is very roughly 5x more dangerous than driving. OTOH the 737MAX averages about 400mph, so per mile it's probably something like 2-3x safer.

The most dangerous parts of flight are during takeoff and landing, something Boeing didn’t seem to accurately account for in the design of the 737 Max’s safety systems.

If you’re over 10K feet in the air there is some room for recovery procedures, but if you haven’t reached cruising altitude you have much less time before a plane finds itself impacting the ground.

Per-mile travelled isn’t an adequate standard to compare aircraft with other modes of transit when talking about safety.

I think per hour of use would be a better metric.

There might be other differences. On the road, a lot depends on your style of driving, whether you are careful, but in case with a plane, you cannot do anything to make the flight safer.

Yes, but on the other hand you can't do very much to make it more dangerous either. If you show up to your flight drunk, you're no more likely to crash.

> endless re-polishing of a system that is super safe already

Scrolling with my mouse is super safe – a system that can crash you into the ground at 500+mph and that relies on single (possibly faulty) sensor is not super safe.

It's not just probability and expectations. People also think, if I'm gonna die, it better be due to my own faults, not Boeing's greed. Just because I might be willing to die at my own hands that doesn't mean I should be okay with you killing me.

Flying on a 737 Max and Driving aren't the only 2 ways to travel long distances.

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