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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure it's irrational at this point. The entire program seems to have been grossly mismanaged, and that includes on the FAA side.

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Let's say 15 year old Toyota arrives on your Uber, instead of a shiny new one - would you cancel and wait for another car? Keep in mind that riding in both cars is statistically vastly more dangerous than flying any modern Boeing, including 737, by a huge margin.

Unless flying is the only mode of transportation you ever use, avoiding Boeing will not make your life safer, it will at most make you calmer.

That's not the choice though. It's choosing one new car that doesn't have a bunch of safety recalls over one that does.

New car reliability measured in warranty returns per vehicle is much WORSE over the last few years than 15 years ago. Turning your nose up at the 15 year old Toyota is probably making a choice to be _less_safe, since at least the old Toyota's recalls are known, and likely fixed. The new vehicle doesn't have enough time on the roads for all the dangerous defects to be identified and recalled yet.

That's one of those numbers people throw around without understanding what it means. The vast majority of new car warranty issues are things like "I don't understand bluetooth" and "You have to actually read the manual?".

The 15 year old Toyota has fewer safety features than the modern one. Side impact airbags, collision monitoring systems etc. Additionally, the 15 year old Toyota will only be as safe as the maintenance that has been done to keep it operating properly. Do you trust a random Uber driver to have kept up with everything?

Back to safety systems, the 15 year old Toyota almost certainly had faulty airbags that were recalled many years ago. Something like 56,000 of those recalls still haven't been done. Which pool of vehicles does this Toyota belong to?

There are some 20 year old Toyota recently recalled over Takata airbags that blow shrapnel in your face potentially leading to your death, but no one is reselling their toyotas, I'm not sure what the HN panic over Boeing airplanes is.

It is a psychological bias called availability heuristic: https://www.scribbr.com/research-bias/availability-heuristic...

They use funny example in this article:

  When asked if falling airplane parts or shark attacks are a more likely cause of death in the United States, most people would say shark attacks. In reality, the chances of dying from falling airplane parts are 30 times greater than the chances of being killed by a shark.

Would be interesting to check if today people would estimate the risk of being killed by falling Boeing door higher than shark attack - bias predicts they would.

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