You're able to specifically recall and cite these more-or-less freak occurrences /because/ they are so rare. You're talking about an incident from > 13 years ago[0] and again - no one died.
Show me deaths from paint chips, volcanos, or any other potential risk. How many times a day do you nearly get killed in a car - you're a split second roll of the dice away from getting killed in a car every single day - which is much more common of course. As they say "close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades".
> The 737MAX disasters were a matter of time. It was pure chance that they didn't happen in the US. The US is not safer here, just luckier. Despite Boeing trying to spin it on "those careless foreign operators".
Of course I followed the MCAS debacle but again, zooming out we're still talking about 346 total fatalities (worldwide) across two incidents that were 3-4 years ago. Using my medical errors comparison that's equivalent to roughly nine hours of deaths due to medical errors - in the US alone. All day, every day. In the time since the MCAS incidents which were riveting, worldwide news roughly 1m people have died from medical errors in the US.
Look at any other category of accidental death where the risk applies to a broad population. Nothing comes close to commercial aviation.
I don't mean to sound callous and reduce these deaths to statistics. If it were a friend or family member of mine I would feel very different but the stats are what they are and commercial aviation has an extremely impressive safety record.
We can care about multiple things simultaneously and Boeing (along with increasingly misplaced "trust" in them on the part of regulators) needs to get it together but speaking personally I feel safer on a plane than I do walking the streets of large cities (the murder rate in Chicago alone was nearly 2x MAX crashes last year alone), driving a car, visiting a hospital, or any other number of activities because the stats show it to be.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_travel_disruption_after_th...
Yes turkeys but not paint chips. Remember when engines were catching ashes from the Iceland eruption that started to glassify inside the combustion chamber?
What happens with accumulated remains of paint chips, we just don't know. Because that's not something that's tested for. It'll have to be a lot of them to matter I'm sure, but some planes are pretty crazily chipping like the A350 was in Qatar.
But the paint chips were just an example. A plane was brought down just by hosing it down with water before takeoff a little bit too close: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/painted-into-a-corner-th...
> Point is these recent events are unacceptable but the fact remains there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US since 2009.
The 737MAX disasters were a matter of time. It was pure chance that they didn't happen in the US. The US is not safer here, just luckier. Despite Boeing trying to spin it on "those careless foreign operators".
In fact the reason MCAS was hidden so much was the insistence of American operators that no new training should be necessary.
> A lot of these aviation threads turn into "peak HN" (like this exchange). I don't blindly trust authorities but maybe,
I do trust the authorities, as long as they don't delegate trust to the industry. Because I don't trust the industry.
> so the industry clearly knows what they're doing and takes safety seriously.
Did you really not follow what Boeing did with MCAS?
The first accident was perhaps an oversight, perhaps they really didn't realise what could happen when a sensor failure brought MCAS to pitch down constantly. Not revealing this clearly which would have prevented the second crash was pretty criminal in my opinion.