> but at the end of the day, nobody has died on an American carrier in a Boeing plane in a very long time.

This is coincidental. When the plug ripped out of the plane over Portland, it was pure luck that no one was sitting in that row. The seats were shredded. If someone had been sitting there, they also would have been shredded.

Boeing and their deteriorated quality culture is directly at fault for that one, and the only thing that prevented a fatality is a coincidence of seating arrangement.

As far as I'm concerned, that resets their safety clock.

If a new 737 were to literally disintegrate in midair, but by pure happenstance it was entirely staffed and occupied by skydivers wearing parachutes and as a result no one dies, that also shouldn't be handwaved off as "oh nobody has died in a long time" just because luck prevented an otherwise sure death in that specific scenario.

Even if, worst case, 3 people had been sitting there and died (and people are tougher than seats), it would only move needle trivially vs cars.

and while the fact related to the risk of flying vs. driving are probably true, they are off-topic and irrelevant.

the reason that large airline safety in the US is so overwhelmingly good is the preceding 20, 30, 40, 50? years of continuous improvements. until the last 5-10 years that is. we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet. when these 2010's and 2020 planes are 15-30 years old, it's going to be a shit-show.

so if you believe that the airlines are too safe, that there is too much margin, they are over-engineered, over-regulated, etc. then that wouldn't be at all irrational. you could trade some gold-plated engineering for profit. you could trade bureaucracy for faster production, maintenance, etc. you could reduce the cost of travel (by how much? it's already cheap). this would be an interesting argument to make. but these decisions should be made in the light of day by the NTSB/FAA, congress, the public, and the shareholders, etc. even then, it's likely that theory would have negative consequences (remember the better-faster-cheaper NASA theory of operation).

the problem is that, instead of an honest choice made in public by the appropriate stakeholders and the flying public, these choices and short-cuts were made in secret, illegally, with extreme dishonestly, repeatedly, for at least a decade, for extremely selfish gains, by FAA and boeing executives.

that's what's not ok. we're told and we expect the nearly perfect safety to continue. what we got was back to the 1950's-1970's era shit-show.

I’m sorry, why does it matter that no one has died on an American carrier for a while? Not so long ago, Boeing sent over 300 people to their deaths with their shoddy MCAS scheme. It’s pure chance that this didn’t happen in the USA so I’m not sure I understand the relevance of the nationalities of the deceased.

It's not pure chance. It was a plane error, but trained pilots following procedure would have responded appropriately and avoided a crash. In response to a plane malfunction, the pilots panicked, did the wrong thing, and everyone died.

This does not excuse Boeing, but it's just the way it is. Training standards are higher in the US than, for example, Ethiopian airlines.

> trained pilots following procedure would have responded appropriately and avoided a crash.

Boeing acted like there was nothing different about the new aeroplanes and therefore did not train the pilots in how to react to the new system. Indeed, that was the original point of MCAS - to avoid pilot re-training. The pilots were not trained in doing the "right thing" and so had no chance of recovering the aircraft. I don't think it's right to blame them. Regardless of whether their overall training was of higher standard, I don't think American pilots would have fared any better since they, too, would have been in the dark.

Thanks

> Aircraft safety is layers on layers on layers.

This is true, but disasters occur because those layers and layers get eroded until there is only one layer left which then fails.

The problem is that Boeing has eroded layers and layers and layers of that safety. The question is "How many of those layers are left?"