SEATTLE — Two crashes of Boeing's 737 MAX plane resulted in 346 deaths. The MAX was supposed to be the safest plane in the sky, but even if Boeing fixes the problem it will be years before it can ever claim that safety title.
The 737 MAX crashes are a setback in an aviation world that was getting dramatically safer. In 2018 and 2019, there's been an uptick in deaths aboard airliners, and the MAX crashes represent a big chunk of the total.
Last year, there were 556 deaths aboard passenger flights. Just over a third of that total came in a single crash in Indonesia in October with a nearly new Boeing 737 MAX crashed into the Java Sea. Then on March 10, a second 737 MAX went down in Ethiopia killing 157 people. That accounts for 71% of global air fatalities this year.
In 2017, there were only 44 deaths aboard flights worldwide.
Your chances of being aboard a fatal flight of an early 737 100/200 model were one in 1,000, according to AirSafe.com. Your chances on a 737 300/400/500 is one in 500,000. You get even safer on the Next Generation of 737s, the 700/800/900 models. Your chances of being on a fatal flight was one in 1.7 billion.
Now that the MAX jets have two fatal accidents in just 650,000 flights, it's safety rate is dramatically higher than its predecessors. It's almost an unfair statistic as the MAX hasn't racked up millions of flights like the others.
But looked at in another way, if it had no more crashes, how long would it take to catch up?
"It may be a decade or more before the 737 MAX has a comparable fatal event rate to the previous generation of the 737," said Todd Curtis of AirSafe.com, who is also a former Boeing safety engineer.