There’s also the “vote with your wallet” aspect of it. I don’t like the direction Boeing is moving. Their past safety profile is less relevant to me than their future trajectory.
(Also, I take the train to the airport, and I minimize highway driving precisely because of its high relative risk.)
In fact, several Airbus crashes have been a result of their illogical control system, with two disconnected, additive-input joysticks.
I don't mean this is a disparaging way, but this perspective is naïve and ignorant.
An incident is anything abnormal, including low tire pressure or bird strike.
The graph uses data from NTSB, a US agency - and the graph shows US data. In the US, vastly more Boeing aircraft are in the skies than Airbus. The graphics is effectively click-bait BS.
This is a chart of incidents, but it doesn't define what an incident is (did anyone get hurt? how many people were hurt? how badly? was it a near-miss, or did the many layers of redundancy in safety handle it fine?), and it doesn't normalize it to incident/flight or incident/mile.
Does Malaysia Airlines having one airplane shot down by the Russians, and another sent into the drink by a pilot-mass-murder-suicide count as an incident? Are either of them Boeing's fault? Are anti-SAM missile defenses supposed to be a standard feature on commercial airliners?
The MAX crashes obviously were, and the MAX has a very bad safety record as a result.
The claim (Boeing is worse than Airbus) is probably correct, but that chart is horrible evidence for it, or for how much worse one is, compared to the other. If you're going to provide evidence for this claim, you need to find something better.
> Does Malaysia Airlines having one airplane shot down by the Russians, and another sent into the drink by a pilot-mass-murder-suicide count as an incident? Are either of them Boeing's fault? Are anti-SAM missile defenses supposed to be a standard feature on commercial airliners?
You're making the mistake of assuming Boeing's fault is what matters. If, for whatever reason, Boeing's planes are more likely to be shot down - regardless of whether or not they are at fault - they are still more dangerous. We are not at the why stage yet, we are at the what stage.
Anyway, since then I've found better data that actually implies Boeing is safer than Airbus.
> Boeing aircraft have a lower frequency of crashes per million flights compared to Airbus, with Boeing having a rate of one crash per 184 million flights and Airbus having a rate of one crash per 081 million flights.
https://www.mightytravels.com/2024/04/comparing-airline-inci...
I've also found a better breakdown comparing the events between the plane manufacturers from my initial graph.
https://statwonk.com/are-boeing-planes-more-dangerous-than-a...
No reasonable person would conclude that.
You either need enough data for it to be statistically significant (Which, given the sample size of one isn't it...)
Or you can work around the lack of statistics, by having a bullet-proof explanation for why Boeings (N=1) get shot down more frequently than Aribuses (N=0). But the bar for that is much higher than 'Well, statistically speaking..."
Statistics are great, because they are a lossy shortcut inform our decisionmaking when we don't actually understand the root causes. But they require statistically significant data to do so. In the absence of it, we have to actually understand the root causes.
I guess this wasn't clear, but I thought this was implied. When I said it's "more likely" I meant you can quantify it. You are correct of course.
Also I agree with everything else you're saying in principle. I kinda feel like we just started the conversation with a misunderstanding about shared assumptions and likely agree with each other.
Example please? I’m fairly well read on aviation incidents and I can’t recall a case of an accident being caused by this in particular.
I do agree the Airbus sidestick setup is stupid, and certainly contributed to this incident. But it’s a different order of stupid to Boeing’s recent malfunctions. I don’t think it makes sense to equivocate here.
But yes, aircraft crashes are rarely if ever the result of a single point of failure. It's always a cascade of failures that leads up to the crash.
CBS News aviation and safety expert Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger explained that he believes that the disappearance would have been less likely to have happened if the plane had been a Boeing instead of an Airbus. This is because the control wheels are larger and more obvious.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20130608033135/http://www.cbsnew...>
(More in the previously-linked Wikipedia article.)
That doesn't mean that Boeing now has its QA in order, or that Boeing's current state proves that anyone else is equally bad. It's just whataboutism.
If I have counted correctly, Airbus appears to be involved in a total of 11. Boeing appears to total 30.
A number of these listings do not involve equipment that was provided or supported by the airframe manufacturer.