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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

fwiw I've been Boeing-negative since the first crash, and I believe I understand the details of how the aircraft was mis-designed, but I fly on the planes. I believe overall they're now about as safe as any other plane I have the option to use.

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Yeah, that's where I am too. Even granting that this is probably the most dangerous airliner design in decades (and, yeah, it probably is), it still remains extremely safe in an absolute sense. If like me you're middle-aged, your chance of dying from any cause on any given day is getting up to around one in a hundred thousand or thereabouts, which is much higher the fraction of fatal crashes in the total list of MAX flights.

Approx. 3700 fatalities a day globally while driving, and no one bats in an eye when it comes to getting in a car.

45k last year in the U.S. = 123/day

1.19 million last year globally = 3260/day

CDC says 1.35 million per year, this also includes pedestrian and cyclist deaths.

https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index....

Planes fell out of the sky all the time in the 1930s-60s and it didn't deter the rich, famous and powerful.

Because if you wanted to travel from Amsterdam to Batavia by ship it would take weeks...

Not to mention multiple orders of magnitude safer than driving to the airport.

Is it, are there any stats to support this? Driving to the airport is different from driving in general where most accidents happen when you are sleepy or close to home. Most deaths occur on two lane highways

> close to home

This sounds like bad statistics to me.

From Google

> The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has stated that more than 50 percent of all car crashes happen within 25 miles of drivers' homes.

But.. do you not do more than 50% of your driving near your home? This doesn't sound like a meaningful statistic at all.

The majority of accidents happen in the house. That is why one should sleep outside on the pavement ;-)

Define close to home. The other responder noted 25 miles. Having lived in cities most my life, I don't think I have ever lived farther than 25 miles to a major airport. But a quick google search: you have somewhere between about a 1 in a 101 to a 1 in 15,000 lifetime chance of dying in a car wreck in the USA and about a 1 in 11,000,000 to 1 in 821,000,000 for lifetime chance of dying in an airplane crash. Even if you take the best odds for cars and the worst odds for airplanes, it's still multiple orders of magnitude...

flying is not safer than driving- unless you drive 500 miles with 150 other people every time you get in the car- statistics are massaged, and I think risk of accident per journey is better (and is higher in flying)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439872

> Not to mention multiple orders of magnitude safer than driving to the airport.

I guess that's counting accidents per distance. Which is a weird metric if you compare a vehicle that is going some 560 miles per hour with one that is going not even 55 mph on average.

By that metric, using a space shuttle is safer than commuting by bicycle in Europe (which is not only extremely safe if you wear a helmet, cycling will statistically make your life longer instead of shorter, in spite of the accident risk, so large are the health advantages..)

How about counting fatalities per distance?

If I need to go to a place 1600 km away and can choose between a car or a plane then fatal accident per km is a metric I would use to see what would be a probability of a fatal accident in either case.

That's based on deaths per mile, right? I'm not sure that is the best way to compare different kinds of transport.

For an extreme example imagine a company that offers trips to the Andromeda galaxy on a fleet of starships. Each ship carries 100 passengers.

There's a 99% chance that the ship explodes when they turn on the warp drive which kills everyone on board. If the ship doesn't explode it will make it safely to the destination.

The passenger fatality rate for that service is only 0.0000000000000069 fatalities per mile. That's nearly 5 orders of magnitude lower than the rate for commercial airlines. It's over 8 orders of magnitude lower than for cars.

But I doubt many people here would consider that to actually be safer than the drive to the spaceport.

The main difference is that you wouldn’t instead drive the whole way instead once you find out the risk. But people do drive the same places they fly

Do they? I’ve never driven from San Francisco to Taipei or London.

But even in context, they’re talking about “the drive to the airport.” Do they drive hundreds/thousands of miles to get to the airport?

Thank the "regulatory state". The problem angle of attack widget is required to be redundant in the US - but not on all export cheaper models. This is why the crashes happened abroad.

In general, US pilots have better training and experience as well.

What do you mean by “about as”? As safe? 5% less safe? 20% less safe?

Right they ironed out all the bugs now in the terrible software that killed people.

I doubt they ironed out the bugs/features in the process that lower the quality for a price. To undo that reorganization would reflect as a massive permanent share value reduction.

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