Eli5: How is it that there are so few passenger plane crashes?

Question

They are so big and it seems like so much could go wrong yet they are statistically extremely successful.

In: Engineering

Answer 1

We’ve adopted a nearly 0 defect mentality with aviation. We accept nearly no risk and mitigate everything else. Theres atleast 3 points of redundancy on a flight critical system on jetliners.

And before anyone is like, “bUt bOeInG.” Even with that, aviation’s track record over the last 30 years is still impeccable.