I think you're cherry picking and looking for reasons for me to be wrong because you don't like my conclusion. The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and FAA were closely affiliated agencies until the '78 deregulation, and in the wake of it the FAA picked up some of the CAB's former duties. The CAB was deregulated out of existence.
And simply saying the Brooking's opinion isn't relevant isn't actually a supporting argument. Neither is stating that trains have more deaths: so do cars, but neither point is relevant to whether or not airplane safety was damaged by deregulation. Besides which, I think your estimate misses the much higher casualty rates among private aircraft, which do in fact rival cars [0]
The question has little to do with whether the FAA has done a good job, it's about what happened after the deregulation, and whether it would be even better without it.
And simply saying the Brooking's opinion isn't relevant isn't actually a supporting argument. Neither is stating that trains have more deaths: so do cars, but neither point is relevant to whether or not airplane safety was damaged by deregulation. Besides which, I think your estimate misses the much higher casualty rates among private aircraft, which do in fact rival cars [0]
The question has little to do with whether the FAA has done a good job, it's about what happened after the deregulation, and whether it would be even better without it.
[0] https://www.livescience.com/49701-private-planes-safety.html