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Comment by jsjohnst

5 years ago

To each their own, but the 737 NG (aka the models before the Max), the 747-400 / 747-8, and the 787 all have a lower number of fatal crashes per million flights than the Airbus A320 family and the A330.

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jsjohnst

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foldr  5 years ago

That's certainly true, but the overall stats are all over the shop (http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm). And many of the more modern models have never had fatal crashes, making this kind of comparison impossible.

  • jsjohnst  5 years ago

    > And many of the more modern models have never had fatal crashes, making this kind of comparison impossible.

    They haven’t had any fatal crashes, but also haven’t flown tens of millions or more of flights either, so I agree, kinda apples and oranges for the Airbus neo models (their “equivalent”, using that term very loosely, to the 737 Max).

    The A380 is the best example though of a zero fatal crash, but hardly any flights by modern standards (I think it’s flown under a million commercial passenger flights total in history, but can’t find a conclusive source). It also had two “uncontained engine failures” causing emergency landings, but thankfully no deaths in either case.

    I’d argue personally that the 777 is a very very safe plane too, despite the numbers not fully supporting it. Of the fatality incidents involving the plane, one was shot down by a missile, one mysteriously disappeared from the earth with no plausible technical failure, and the final one was a clearly incompetent flight crew missing the runway at SFO.

Spartan-S63  5 years ago

These are all true statistics. I’d be curious to see an academic analysis on QC, flight hours, maintenance routines/quality of maintenance, and other factors that might play into why those aircraft have better safety ratings than competitors. It might be interesting to see if Boeing QC issues off the assembly line lead to better maintenance routines, which in turn results in safer overall operation. A result like that doesn’t imply that the manufacturer, Boeing, is the most influential component to safety.

  • coredog64  5 years ago

    That’s not correct. For a long time, Boeing and Airbus had wildly different philosophies about how aircraft should be flown. I’m not going to pick a side as there are trade offs to both approaches, but there were a LOT of teething problems with the Airbus approach. I think we’ve settled down now and have a better handle on how to train for either approach. Of course, Boeing has also picked up (or been forced to adopt) pieces of the strategy used by Airbus.