Boeing 737 Sets Standard For Flight Safety
In an industry driven by safety, the Boeing 737 has set a remarkable standard.
- The 737 family's accident rate is less than half that of the total jet fleet.
- Over the history of jet aviation, the 737-300/-400/-500 series has one of the best safety records among airplanes with more than a million departures.
- The Next-Generation 737 series-including the -600/-700/-800/-900--has one of the best safety records among airplanes with more than a million departures.
This record stands as a testament to the Boeing twinjet's rugged reliability, for it is the workhorse of the world jet fleet. 737s serve highly advanced routes in Europe and the United States; but they're also found in the world's most demanding regions, where air transportation systems are less sophisticated.
More than 5,000 737s had been delivered by the end of Feb. 2006. They had accumulated more than 232 million flights and nearly 296 million flight hours - or 33,789 years in the air. No other jetliner family has matched this endurance.
Approximately 4,100 Boeing 737 model airplanes are in service worldwide - more than any other commercial airplane produced. The 737 represents more than a quarter of the world's large commercial jet transport fleet. Somewhere in the world a Boeing 737 takes off or lands every 4.6 seconds.
The standard industry measure of safety is "hull losses per million departures," a statistic which allows comparison across airplane types.*
At the end of 2004, the 737 family's hull loss rate was 0.82 per million departures; the total jet fleet's rate was 1.62. The 737-300/-400/-500 family accident rate was 0.37 per million departures.
This is a superb record, but Boeing is committed to continuous improvement in all its products and services and will continue to enhance the 737 family. That is why the 737 will remain the industry's reliable airplane for decades into the future.
At the end of Feb. 2006, Boeing had announced orders for 6,160 737s and had delivered 5,009 to more than 200 operators in more than 100 countries around the world. Approximately 1,250 of the twinjets are in the air at any given time.
* A "hull loss" is an airplane that is not economically reparable; accident statistics generally do not include losses due to terrorism or those occurring during experimental flights. Because reliable statistics have not been available, jetliners built in the CIS (former Soviet Union) are not included. Jets under 60,000 pounds gross weight are excluded. Rates are measured per million departures because there is a stronger statistical correlation between accidents and departures than between accidents and flight hours or passenger miles or number of airplanes in service.