> According to [1], commercial planes are about 3 times safer than buses per passenger mile.
Uh... the "Fatalities by passenger miles" chart in that article says that fatalities per billion passenger miles are 70 times lower for commercial planes vs. buses.
And in fact if you normalize to actually comparable transportation modes, my guess is it's even worse. The overwhelming majority of bus miles are driven on urban transit routes at low speed. You'd want to split out long haul (Greyhound et. al.) buses to compare to aviation, and highway travel is always going to involve more fatalities.
Basically, even knowing that it's probably the most dangerous jetliner in decades, I'd still view a 737 MAX as an extremely safe travel option.
Fortunately, one normally doesn’t take a 737 to the corner store, drop the kids at school, or go out for lunch. The only thing normalizing by trip tells us is people take lots of car trips.
Well, yeah, because airliners are extremely large. If you do the same thing for cruise ships, they surely look horrifically dangerous! "Heart attack fatalities per trip" are off the charts.
When a regular person asks "is this safe?" they mean "is it safe for me?", not whether someone else on the vehicle might get injured.
Uh... it was an example showing the flaw in the logic. You can't compare a 300-seat jetliner to a motorcycle in a metric of "fatalities per trip", because that doesn't give you any useful information about the subject under discussion ("am I going to die on this trip?"). It's just bad risk analysis.
Uh... the "Fatalities by passenger miles" chart in that article says that fatalities per billion passenger miles are 70 times lower for commercial planes vs. buses.
And in fact if you normalize to actually comparable transportation modes, my guess is it's even worse. The overwhelming majority of bus miles are driven on urban transit routes at low speed. You'd want to split out long haul (Greyhound et. al.) buses to compare to aviation, and highway travel is always going to involve more fatalities.
Basically, even knowing that it's probably the most dangerous jetliner in decades, I'd still view a 737 MAX as an extremely safe travel option.