[bobsomers]

> It already has two crashes under its belt, compared to other models that never had any crashes (like the A380).

You can't come to any conclusions from simple math like that because it isn't corrected for flight hours and exposure. There are literally 10x more 737 Max's delivered so far than there are total A380s left flying, and they're constantly booked doing short to medium haul flights all day long rather than a single long-haul flight per day. And given that takeoff and landing are the riskiest phases of flight, it should also probably be corrected by flight cycles, not pure flight hours.

It's nowhere close to as simple as you make it out to be.

[diggan]

As a thought experiment, I just gonna make up some numbers then.

A380 has X flight hours, with N landings, with no crashes

737 Max has X * 10000 flight hours, with N * 10000 landings, with two crashes

No matter how you calculate it, 737 Max been through more crashes than A380, unless you ignore the previous two crashes, obviously.

[bobsomers]

> No matter how you calculate it, 737 Max been through more crashes than A380, unless you ignore the previous two crashes, obviously.

Correct, but again this is too simplistic of a view and it's not a question that gives you any real information.

Consider a brand new airplane that has never flown. It's also been in zero crashes. Is it obviously safer than the 737 Max? Clearly not, so what is the real question you want to answer?

What you really want to know is, based on the existing data, how likely is it that I will crash if fly on an A380 vs a 737 Max? This is question that ultimately hinges on the predictive power of the existing data, and when you are dealing with rare events, the data volume makes a huge difference in your confidence intervals.

Without drowning the conversation in details, if you modeled crashes as a Poisson process (which may or may not be appropriate), there are absolutely situations in which a 737 Max with 2 crashes is the obvious statistical choice over an A380 with none, simply because you have so much more data for the Max that you have tight confidence intervals around the flight not ending in a crash.

With much less data on the A380s side, the confidence intervals are wider and it's possible that it's actually more likely that your A380 becomes the first crash than that you experience the third 737 Max crash!

I'm not saying this is definitively the case, it would require lots of specific data I don't have access to and a subject matter expert to sign off on the modeling, but X is not safer than Y simply because X has a fewer total number of events.