Originally Posted by
MSPeconomist
Someone earlier in this thread stated that 0.5% ( 2 out of 350, so there's been some rounding) of this aircraft model have crashed, but what percentage of all the Concords that were ever build have crashed? Yet it was viewed as safe until the CDG runway incident happened and possibly should have still been considered safe. Or we can look at the space shuttle for another example. One crashed (cold weather O ring failure at launch), but that one is a big fraction of the number that were build and also a relatively big fraction of the total number of space shuttle flights that were ever attempted.
It's hard to conclude much (if anything) from a few bad random draws from a distribution where the bad draws occur with extremely low frequency. For example, think about Hurricane Katrina and the "once in a hundred years" claim.
It's not the statistics and the small numbers that are worrisome
The worrisome thing is
-- Similar circumstances
-- The failure to educate the pilots and have proper manuals
-- The possibility that the system is inherently dangerous because it relies on pilots remembering to disable it, instead of defaulting to the safe option
-- The chatter about the size of the jet engines relative to fuselage making the plane inherently unstable vis a vis center of gravity causing nose up attitude instead of stable flight
So, the prudent thing to do is GROUND all the damn planes until they sort out what happened.
And if the planes are found to be inherently dangerous, they should be written off and Boeing take a huge charge and loss.
End of story. Cannot have moral hazard here, the manufacturers and airlines must accept zero incidents and zero only.
This crashing business is BS already. And if it is just chance.... well too bad, ground first, ask questions later.