Yes, I mean obviously cargo ships are not well inspected, they lose power all the time and companies just hope it doesn't happen near anything important. The oil industry is like this, you've got bottom-of-the-barrel tankers (https://www.amazon.com/Tankship-Tromedy-Impending-Disasters-...), spills continuing for decades (https://www.propublica.org/article/chevron-will-pay-record-f...), leaking methane wells permanently abandoned by "bankrupt" companies, etc.

You're definitely right that we're all paying extra attention to Boeing at the moment, but if you look around I think you'll find that there actually have been pretty recent famous failures in quite a few industries.

According to this book: https://www.amazon.com/Tankship-Tromedy-Impending-Disasters-...

It is quite common and vessels often have outages that leave them Not Under Command. Usually they are safely at sea when this happens and they can drift for hours without causing problems. But of course there's always a possibility of it happening at exactly the wrong moment.

The reasons for this are the usual: lack of redundancy, lack of maintenance, overworked and understaffed crews, etc. etc. The book lays out how ships are pretty much designed to be floating disasters and the Class societies (essentially privatized regulators) are in the pockets of the builders, and they are so captured that they make rules that make it difficult to make safe vessels.

For instance, he was trying to design multi-screw vessels but the rules now assume single-screwed ships and it can be impossible to design in additional shaft alleys and still conform.