You can maybe argue that you’re LESS safe. But how much so? I suspect the percentage is out to three or four decimal places. In practical terms it doesn’t matter much.

As for pilot suicides, let’s see… EgyptAir in 1996, the Germanwings thing, and MH370 (probably). That’s three in a 30-year span. Am I missing any? Not sure I’d call that a “thing.”

P

It very much was greed. The choice to spend 10s of billions of dollars on stock buybacks, instead of one 10 billion dollars on developing a successor to the 50 year old 737 airframe, was greed. Greed, greed, greed. Greed straight into the pockets of stockholding and stock option holding Boeing management.

The design failures such as inherent in MCAS, and the coverup of those failures during certification, were entirely predictabe. You squeeze the process too hard, you go to the well one too many times with an ancient design that couldn’t get certification today if presented as new, you get bad outcomes. Monday morning quarterbacking on specific failures is bullshit–they fired or drove off most of their engineering talent that could have said “waitaminnit…”, and built a culture of punishing those remaining who did speak up. Combine that with their regulatory capture of the FAA (they were literally paying the FAA employees and doing FAA employee evaluations and assignments), and this wasn’t a holes in the swiss cheese lining up, it was taking a chainsaw to the cheeseblock.

That’s BILLIONS of $$$ worth of Boeing airplanes plus contracts for long-term multi-airplane 737MAX delivery streams.
Boeing’s management has many shortcomings. But, deliberately wrecking decades-long customer relationships all for a bit of short-term profit at a cost of billions of $$$ in future business is not one of them.

The accidents resulted from something worse than greed: a lethal combination of negligence by Boeing management and FAA certification plus Boeing engineering’s stupid design errors.
The fundamental error was Boeing’s: they designed, tested, certified and delivered an airplane with an undocumented fatal flaw. That flaw was MCAS a single-path system with a catastrophically-lethal failure mode. It violated the “Prime Directive” of airliner design: a single failure must NEVER EVER cause the loss of an airplane
A single failure caused each MAX crash, ending 346 lives. Not because of deliberate greed or malice, but because of stupidity, incompetence and negligence.

His post was short but ominous:
“For reasons I do not understand, I have the strange feeling there would be a fatal commercial passenger aircraft accident in the next four weeks.
Maybe it is just because I did not sleep well last night.”

Your pessimism and his could be summarized as
“Cheer up, things could be worse. So I cheered up and things got worse”.

“Across the country, the number of cyclists that are seriously injured or killed is soaring. According to the National Safety Council, 1,260 bicyclists were killed in 2020, up 16% from the year before and an increase of 44% over the past decade.”

More cyclists are being killed by cars. Advocates say U.S. streets are the problem