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by diggan
859 days ago
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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. |
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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.