Why does the Boeing 737 have 5 x the passenger fatalities of the Airbus 320? I thought I'd compare the accident rates of these two similar, competing, very successful aircraft.

                    737     A320

Introduced          1968    1988
Number Built        8104    6171
Accidents/Incidents  329      60
Hull Loss Accidents  154      23
Fatalities          4287     782


These figures are from the respective Wikipedia pages. I assume they have not been the subject of edit-war falsification by fanboys of planemakers.

I wondered what might be the reason for the 737 seeming a much less safe plane.


The 737 design is 20 years older? 


But it's still in production, so 1988...current 737s can be built with many of the same safety features found in an A320 produced the same year. Were 3,500 of those fatalities in the first 20 years?

There are lots more older less-safe 737s being flown by corner-cutting budget airlines in third-world kleptocracies?


Are there that many 40-year old 737s in the hands of incompetent airlines?

The 8,104 737s have, on average, flown many times more cycles than the 6,171 A320s? 


But they address the same market, why would their usage differ so markedly?

The 737s have, together, flown many times more passenger-miles than the A320s? 


See above. Plus I imagine older 737s have mostly been retired.



My speculation doesn't seem very convincing to me. Is there a better explanation supported by reputable studies?
For one, the early 737s had a design flaw which allowed the rudder to reach a hard-over position, and get stuck there. Boeing initially dragged their feet in rectifying this, so it took a number of accidents before this design flaw was corrected. This is a major contributor to the high number of fatalities in the early operational years.

To have a more meaningful comparison, I would suggest to compare the fatalities per year, so the status in operational procedures can be excluded as a factor. As others have pointed out, this should give a more equal basis for a comparison.

If you look at fatalities per year, beginning in 2000, these numbers emerge:


Now you need to factor in the number of flight hours per type per year, which I do not have available. But I would expect that the low fatality rate in the early 2000s is more due to the small number of A320s around. But if we just compare the 737 NG with the A320, this advantage is reversed, and still the A320 comes out slightly ahead.

But thankfully, there are very few accidents for each type per year, so the statistical base is too low for a meaningful comparison. If we want to draw any conclusions, it could be that the A320 is indeed a safer aircraft, but the certainty of this conclusion is very low, being based on a very small number of accidents.