It's not really an apt comparison. There were a lot of factors which culminated in that crash.

The 737 MAX was an unsafe design which Boeing was aware of and failed to address.

Airbus’s human factor engineering was so bad that it led experienced pilots to fly a perfectly good aircraft into the ocean. They were repeatedly warned about this, and still have not fully fixed it.

On the other hand, there was Qantas flight 32:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...

Airbus’s flight controls worked sufficiently well that the pilots could still keep the plane in the air and then land it successfully despite the massive damage to the plane.

They acted on it. Wikipedia writes: "On 12 August 2009, Airbus issued three mandatory service bulletins, requiring that all A330 and A340 aircraft be fitted with two Goodrich 0851HL pitot tubes and one Thales model C16195BA pitot (or, alternatively, three of the Goodrich pitot tubes); Thales model C16195AA pitot tubes were no longer to be used."

The pitot tubes were not the root cause of that crash.

Yes, they were. They got stuck with ice and they disagreed in the air speed sent. Because of this the autopilot was disabled and the flight controls were switched in alternate law 2. The pilot that was flying failed to realise that this meant that his inputs had a much bigger effect compared to normal flight and he panicked and he also failed to relinquish control to the much more experienced pilot (on that model) multiple times. How are the pitot tubes not the root cause?

Malfunctioning pitot tubes do not cause an otherwise fine airplane to depart controlled flight.

The root cause was human factors.

Even then, they still fixed the tubes on all their planes. Seems only right, doesn't it?

accident statistics:

Boeing 737: 149 accidents

Boeing 747: 49 accidents

Airbus A300: 33 accidents

Airbus A320: 28 accidents

Boeing 737 NG / Max: 27 accidents

Is there data which shows accidents per flight?

edit:

I found some and put it into a Sheet for convenience of sort-ability.

As far as raw accident per flight data, only Concorde is worse than the Max series. Wow.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FTq3PwQMb83dnNtxwZoY...

http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

We'd probably also want to see separate stats for issues that occur shortly before landing or after takeoff -- stuff that may be more likely to come up with every flight regardless of duration.

You are correct. Apologies, prior to seeing your response I had updated my comment stating that, and also found some data.

Fixed Sheet link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_TJgrH-3UtEI4oq3K3qt...

Punch line: the 737-MAX has an accident rate 12x higher than the 737.

Stunning.

28.

Alaska Airlines Flight 1282