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Old 12-15-2025 | 10:47 AM
  #39  
Sled
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Joined: Feb 2015
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From: FO
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The relevant metric is number of hull losses per departure. Easy google search turns up the following (Boeing publishes every year...this chart breaks it down as hull losses per million departures):

https://www.voronoiapp.com/transport...raft-Type-5491

Then we can do some rough math to figure out total MD-11 departures. ChatGPT estimated approximately 3.2 million total departures, with a range of 3.0-3.4 million. Its math seemed reasonable to me. With a total of 10 MD-11 hull losses, we can compute the MD-11 hull loss rate per million departures as:

10/3.2 = 3.125 hull losses per million departures

(with a range of 3.333 to 2.94 for the low and high end of number of departures respectively). If you compare it to Boeing's data in the link you see that the MD-11 has a safety record that is basically on par with older aircraft which are no longer in service. For the sake of comparison, the other aircraft in service at FDX and UPS have the following rates:

777: 0.12
767: 0.13
757: 0.22
747-8: 0
737-400: 0.54
A300-600: 0.53 (I think all of the freighters are -600s)

So statistically speaking, the MD-11 is about 23-26 times more dangerous then similarly sized Boeing freighters (767, 777) and about 5 times more dangerous than the A300.

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