Perhaps you have heard that the death rate per 100 million passenger miles varies greatly by method of transportation. This is true as shown by this linked graph. Basically the lowest that passenger cars dips to is 0.5 deaths per 100 million miles over the years 2007 to 2022. The highest any of the other three transportation modes goes to is 0.1 deaths per 100 million miles by passenger rail in 2008. Buses and scheduled airline flights both have fewer deaths per 100 million miles of travel.
Indeed, scheduled airline flights have so many fewer deaths, that it is only visible on this graph for one year. That is for the year 2009. Congrats airlines! You are the safest method of travel for every year compiled by this graph.
Boeing has been criticized for shoddy workmanship in their planes over the last few years. Issues keep arising. Look at these 9 incidents from the first 3 months of the year.
Perhaps Boeing feels sorry for its huge advantage over passenger car fatalities per 100 million miles. Perhaps Airbus will follow Boeing’s lead in the shoddy workmanship department, so passenger deaths per 100 million miles will at least show up on the chart every year.
So what’s next for Boeing? Why space of course.
Do you know that the space station orbits the earth 16 times a day. That’s 25 000 miles every 90 minutes. It’s been up for how long now? And no one has died, even including the rocket flights up to it and back. With seven astronauts in it since 2000, that is about 25 billion miles with zero fatalities. This is even better than the scheduled airline flights.
So the first Boeing Starliner to make it to the International Space Station has problems with leaks and might not make it back to earth with live crew members. NASA wants an even better record in space so they scrubbed the return via Boeing. What can one say? Boeing might have brought down that record if only for a year.
So now, without Boeing to even things out, it falls down to all of us to increase the number of miles driven in a passenger car without fatalities. That means no drunk driving, no distracted driving, no speeding etc. We can even out the death rates by being almost perfect!
I doubt Boeing will help much. They are changing CEOs and have been concerned with a falling reputation. So if perfect isn’t possible for us in our own cars, don’t expect continued help from Boeing. Indeed, I bet some statisticians want to now start a graph of death rates which pits Boeing directly against Airbus. Something that is easily done when there are only a couple big players in scheduled airline flights.
