“It’s good to put the number of failures in perspective as you have done, but it would be a lot more meaningful if there were information on the total number of planes that were produced and put into service.”
Okay, here you go, the numbers of planes manufactured are as follows:
A300 561 0.019% incident rate
A310 255 0.027% incident rate
A320 3893 0.003% incident rate
A330 616 0.005% incident rate
A340 365 0.005% incident rate
Total Airbus aircraft manufactured = 5690
Total overall incident rate = 0.006%
737 6000 0.014% incident rate
747 1416 0.025% incident rate
757 1050 0.009% incident rate
767 975 0.009% incident rate
Total Boeing aircraft manufactured = 9441
Total overall incident rate = 0.015%
So, by my calculations, Boeing has more than twice the failure rate of the Airbus equipment.
(total manufacture figures through May 2009 taken from Wikipedia, incident rates taken from airdisaster.com)
Please note, I have no dog in the fight other than being a frequent business traveler.
Here’s another way to look at it - total number of fatalities.
In all of the classes of aircraft I listed above, there were:
A300 1416 fatalities
A310 645 fatalities
A320 443 fatalities
A330 235 fatalities
A340 0 fatalities
Total Airbus Fatalities = 2739
737 4444 fatalities
747 3550 fatalities
757 576 fatalities
767 850 fatalities
Total Boeing Fatalities = 9420
So Airbus represents 22.5% of all of the fatalities in the above equipment classes, whereas Boeing represents 77.5% of fatalities.
(as you can see by my previous several postings, I obviously am not working this week and have way too much time on my hands)