Right now it seems the airlines (and especially Boeing aircraft) are suffering an epidemic of equipment failures and mishaps. Count me somewhat skeptical. I suspect the Alaska Air door frame blow out a few weeks ago, along with the tire falling off a United 777 the other day, has put the media on high alert, and now many episodes of mishaps and irregularities that might have gone unnoticed or unreported in the general media (the specialty aerospace press is a different matter—Aviation Week and Space Technology was a staple of my household’s magazine subscription pile when I was growing up, and it had lots of neat stories about aircraft problems) and are a source of headlines. (There is a second possibility: that standards for maintenance and manufacturing crews have been eroded on account of diversity mandates. . .)

Here’s the long-term data for mortality from airplane airframe-related accidents: