I don't know that I agree with the thrust of this writer's argument, because I don't think that whether or not it's a more dangerous year on average is the issue. The fact that Boeing's planes are so shoddily built that it has the potential for things to get much worse is much higher than it used to be. The implication seems to be that we shouldn't be concerned about the issues with the 737 MAX because this is an average year for accidents.
aside from recently, when was the last time an airplane's door plug was ripped from the fuselage?
Like the premise is that on average things aren't any worse. But there's mechanical issues... and then there's "Supposedly-permanently-installed-panels" getting ripped off the side of the plane. or like the MCAS system and the headaches that caused.
This is definitely a case of selective statistics.
It's also the nature of the problems. It's one thing for something to fail due to difficult to detect material defects or weird freak mechanical stresses. It's entirely a different matter for things to fail because of just blatantly shoddy work or because the entire design is fundamentally broken. The kinds of failures Boeing has been experiencing are very much the latter not the former. They're the sort of things that shouldn't ever happen and yet they seem to have become the new normal for Boeing.
The metric to measure the distance is a bit weird. Revenue passenger miles. Does that mean a 1000 miles flight with 200 people is 200,000 miles in this unit? Because that is already like a light second
It really is an astounding safety record compared to ground transport of all kinds. Literally every American can name several personal acquaintances who died or were severely injured in car crashes, but nobody thinks twice about automotive travel.