> 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.

"Most dangerous way of traveling"" This is the kind of alarmist stuff that gets perpetuated on social media and reddit.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/boeing-737-max-8-compares-142...

"Well-known and popular commercial aircraft have been involved in far more fatal accidents than the Boeing 737 Max 8. The 3,065 fatalities onboard the Tupolev Tu-154 are more than any of the 47 aircraft models Quartz analyzed. But commercial staples from Boeing, the 737-200 and 747-200, rank second and third on the list, with 2,910 and 1,664 fatalities respectively."

Counting absolute numbers makes no sense, in the long run any plane model will kill an infinite number of people; what matters is the rate - that is, the slope in that first graph - and the MAX8 has the steepest. As they write, "Compared to the planes involved in accidents with the most fatalities since 1966, the 737 Max 8 has had more fatalities in its first years in service than any of the other."

Also, conditions outside of the plane should matter. The Tupolev you listed was typically poorly maintained and flown to places like Irkutsk or Arkhangelsk, taking off from and landing onto short or poorly maintained runways, often in winter, with technology available in the sixties to the Soviets. The fact that more deaths happened sooner on a modern aircraft built with state-of-the-art technology, flown primarily by its largest users on routes like Dallas to Miami, should be somewhat alarming.