I mean exactly what I said: anyone who has this fear, which is untethered from reality, should not trust their intuition about what mechanisms are important for safety.
Your statistics are a tough pitch when we're hearing about chronic deficiencies like bolts missing from doors and whatnot. I don't have a fear of flying, but my intuition tells me the effects of Boeing mismanagement will take years to peter out and I don't think it's unreasonable I'm avoiding their newer planes even if it causes me some inconvenience.
I can’t tell if you’re arguing (a) that the old statistics aren’t a reliable guide to the future because of recent events or (b) you can’t/won’t listen to the data because of strong emotions induced by the Boeing stories.
If (a), then you’re wrong. It’s exactly because this has been going on at Boeing for years (and because planes are so outrageously same that they can get 10x more dangerous without it much affecting the assessment) that we can upper bound how much new risk there is at a quite small level.
You know about the missing bolts and whatnot because there is a process for uncovering them. Do you want to guess how many missing bolts auto mechanics leave out when they do car repairs? Nobody knows because nobody is keeping track.
> We know about the bolts because a door blew off a plane mid-flight
We know about the bolts because a door blew off a plane mid-flight and there are reporting requirements when that happens. Then there is an investigation.
When a door falls off a car driving down the road, the driver picks it up and puts it in the trunk and has it reattached or replaced. Whether they even file an insurance claim depends on their deductible and either way nobody is doing a root cause analysis to prevent it from happening again.
It shouldn't take an incident like a panel detaching mid-flight to discover the missing bolts. The processes clearly aren't working very well at Boeing.
