Air transportation may be overall safe, but the 737 Max was a dangerous aircraft that resulted in hundreds of deaths. Youer position is extraordinarily peurile.
https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
(Note this data is only up to 2019 for 737 models, but that's exactly the time period at which decisions had to be made, of whether to continue flying it or not).
There's absolutely no way it was a more dangerous form of travel than driving.
I am intimately familiar with both catastrophic failures of the 737 Max, which involved undertrained pilots from third world airlines.
As soon as the emulator got bad feedback from the one sensor that was used to map "max" airframe behavor to "737" controls, all bets were off. And because the pilots weren't allowed to know they were in a Max not a 737 (which would require further training that would void the advantages of the Max) there was no SOP for how to deal with "your Max is blind and can't pretend to be a 737"
The "poorly trained" pilots weren't test pilots -- pilots aren't supposed to be able to improvise and react to things off book.
Both pilots had multiple thousands of flight hours (well beyond the minimum 1500 required to co-pilot in the US). Only the co-pilot of the Ethiopian Air flight would have been deemed too new to fly for a US airline (and even then, only post-Colgan Air 3407).
1 - https://fortune.com/2020/01/14/boeing-lion-air-extra-737-max...
There were, however, reasons to be skeptical. Firstly, unlike in most other cases, it was not designed to halt when opposed by the pilot’s use of the control yoke (to do so would defeat the purpose of MCAS.) Secondly, it was found in flight testing that MCAS needed to be made much more aggressive, yet the original decision was allowed to stand. Thirdly, it could stop on its own accord, only to start up again a few seconds later.
Consequently, while MCAS failure is nominally handled as a form of trim runaway, it did not present itself to pilots like the trim runaway scenarios they had trained for.
There may have been a path to saving the aircraft, but it definitely didn't seem at all intuitive. And figuring it out while the plane is actively trying to crash itself is a pretty big ask.
This possibility was mentioned in the AFM, but the recommended response - pitch nose-down to decrease the load - was not feasible in the situation.
There was IIRC 8~16 hours of training that was intended to be mandated, but Boeing told airlines that training was not necessary. So many (not all) pilots never learned the deeper mechanisms of MCAS. This would reduce costs, and increase desirability of the aircraft.
But it gets even worse! The FAA approved Boeing's request to remove a description of MCAS from the aircraft manual! So no, most pilots wouldn't even be able to learn about it even if they wanted to!
There was 0 redundancy. The MCAS was directed by ONE SINGLE AoA (Angle of Attack) SENSOR! No backups!
Even worse! Boeing was aware of the problems as of 2016! They even knew MCAS violated Boeing's own design documents and rules for the max8!
And yet here you are blaming the pilots instead of the money grubbers at the top.