[rootusrootus]

> 737

You mean 737MAX. The 737 and 737NG have been around for decades (almost 60 years for the 737, almost 30 for the 737NG). IIRC the 737NG has a reasonable case for being the safest airliner ever built. There are some designs that have no fatalities, but they also have very low production numbers to go with it.

[panarky]

> safest airliner ever built ... very low production numbers

If one model has 5 million flight hours and zero crashes, and another model has 500 million flight hours and 50 crashes, is it possible to say which model is safer?

[o11c]

The point in the outer comment was that the 737NG has both many flight hours and ... if I skimmed Wikipedia correctly, only 1 mechanically-attributed fatality.

For reference, the most-produced passenger/cargo aircraft:

  16K Douglas DC-3 (1935)
  11K Boeing 737 family:
    1K Original (1967)
    2K Classic (1984)
    7K NG (1998)
    1K MAX (2016)
  11K Airbus A320 family (1988)

Different sources give oddly different numbers (more than I would expect for ordered vs built vs delivered; I didn't investigate deeply), but nothing else is above 2K. Note that plenty of small or military planes beat these numbers.

[kazen44]

its actually kind of crazy how much military planes where produces during world war 2.

Look at this list[0]: the soviet IL-2 plane has produced more planes the the entire list of planes mentioned above over a period of 4 years!

That is just one type of plane, for one country during a very short period..

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_aircraft

[dahdum]

I’ll take the one with 50 crashes any time. That’s 50 times something went catastrophically wrong and 50 times measures were taken to fix the underlying problems.

A brand new plane will undoubtedly have brand new problems.

[Zetobal]

Until 1980-1990 I would completely agree but with the more recent history of basically everything I am not so sure anymore.

[lostlogin]

What has been done by Boeing that makes you feel that they have fixed everything up and that safety is their top priority?

They seem more keen on getting legislative change and regulation bypass or exemption.

[ric2b]

I think this is the wrong take, for the following reasons:

- There is no reason to assume that the learnings from the 50 crashes weren't also applied to the newer model. In fact you'd expect that they all were. - Faults in a new design are likely to be front-loaded, meaning most of the crashes would have happened earlier than later. Therefore the new model seems to be a much safer design if it flew 10% of the miles without even 10% of the crashes (actually 0%).

[panarky]

The point is that commercial aviation is so extraordinarily safe, that mechanical failures that result in fatalities are too rare to determine if a model with 5 million flight hours is more or less safe than another model with 500 million flight hours.

Zero fatalities does not mean the aircraft is statistically safer unless it has an order of magnitude more flight hours.

[Dah00n]

I'm not sure if I agree or not, but my thinking were that it wouldn't reach great safety by upgrades until long after it became too expensive for Boeing and would instead be replaced with a new model.