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> I bet if you do the numbers it is the most dangerous way of traveling

That's just crazy talk. If it's more dangerous than a car I'll eat my hat.

According to NYT/Flightaware, there were ~8600 737Max flights per week. Let's call it 8000, and limit our analysis to the past year. Let's also make the very low assumption there are only 100 passengers on each.

8000 * 100 * 50 is very conservative 40 million passenger trips per year. And there were 350 deaths.

Cars have a fatality rate of ~1 per 100 million miles. That means that the average distance traveled needs to be ~1000 miles to be better than cars.

I challenge you to find better numbers estimates, but my very conservative numbers says they're on par or better than cars. I must confess I'm a little surprised how close it was.



I thinks it’s more comparison to compare travel time than travel distance when measuring safety. If we invented teleportation device that could whisk humans billions a mile way to the next star but killed 1/2 of the people that used it, it shouldn’t be considered the safest way of traveling.


Air travel should be much safer than driving. That it barely is in the case of the 737 MAX is itself a huge indictment.


Absolutely 100% agreed. I started with that assumption and figured that even with very conservative numbers I'd be well below the number of driving fatalities. I did that calculation as I wrote that comment and didn't retroactively edit my initial reactions or change any numbers to fit my bias.

I'd love to see someone figure out the real numbers here.


Yeah, I was just emphasizing your point that you arrived at organically while doing the calculations. Definitely on the same page as you.




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