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By the way, the difference between the safety factors of driving and flying are not quite so straightforward. This is one of my favorite charts, which shows tha

by jsharf 8y ago

By the way, the difference between the safety factors of driving and flying are not quite so straightforward. This is one of my favorite charts, which shows that per-mile, flying is safer, but per-journey, driving is safer (which makes some sense, since flying journeys are much longer, but 80% of accidents happen in the 5 minutes during takeoff/landing, so really in some sense, takeoff and landing are more dangerous than driving to work). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comparisons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comp... Also, note the final entry in that table: Space Shuttle. Per-kilometer, it's hardly that much more dangerous than driving. But per Journey....

mikeash 8y ago
Those numbers are for the UK in the 1990s. Commercial aviation is much safer today. The fatality rate per journey for US airlines over the last ten years is approximately 0.14 per billion journeys, several hundred times better than the number from your link. (Roughly 700 million journeys per year on average, one fatality during that period.) Cars have gotten safer too, but not nearly as much.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Is there a point at which the statistics are too muddy to be useful? We have had 1 fatality in the last ten years, but in the last 10 years, 1 month, and 1 day we have had 51 fatalities.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Definitely! If you take the fatalities for the last ten years and convert that to a risk estimate, the result will have gigantic error bars. We can be confident that the real risk is greater than zero, and it's pretty clear that it's small, but the exact number is pretty much impossible to know. The farther back you look, the less noise you get in your data, but you also incorporate data that's less and less relevant to the current environment. Ten years seems like a decent cutoff, although it is a cutoff that happens to have had a wild swing recently. My original point still stands if you want to take the data back a bit further: even if you include Colgan, the resulting number is way below the 117 per billion listed on that Wikipedia page.
js2 8y ago
It is therefore important to use each statistic in a proper context. When it comes to a question about risks associated with a particular long-range travel from one city to another, the most suitable statistic is the third one, thus giving a reason to name air travel as the safest form of long-range transportation.
a3n 8y ago
Also, for many (?) to most (?) people, flying is unnecessary, added risk, while for the same group of weasel word identified people, driving is an arguable necessity. EDIT: Added more weasel words.

by jsharf 8y ago

mikeash 8y ago

Those numbers are for the UK in the 1990s. Commercial aviation is much safer today. The fatality rate per journey for US airlines over the last ten years is approximately 0.14 per billion journeys, several hundred times better than the number from your link. (Roughly 700 million journeys per year on average, one fatality during that period.) Cars have gotten safer too, but not nearly as much.

rootusrootus 8y ago
Is there a point at which the statistics are too muddy to be useful? We have had 1 fatality in the last ten years, but in the last 10 years, 1 month, and 1 day we have had 51 fatalities.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Definitely! If you take the fatalities for the last ten years and convert that to a risk estimate, the result will have gigantic error bars. We can be confident that the real risk is greater than zero, and it's pretty clear that it's small, but the exact number is pretty much impossible to know. The farther back you look, the less noise you get in your data, but you also incorporate data that's less and less relevant to the current environment. Ten years seems like a decent cutoff, although it is a cutoff that happens to have had a wild swing recently. My original point still stands if you want to take the data back a bit further: even if you include Colgan, the resulting number is way below the 117 per billion listed on that Wikipedia page.

js2 8y ago

It is therefore important to use each statistic in a proper context. When it comes to a question about risks associated with a particular long-range travel from one city to another, the most suitable statistic is the third one, thus giving a reason to name air travel as the safest form of long-range transportation.

a3n 8y ago

Also, for many (?) to most (?) people, flying is unnecessary, added risk, while for the same group of weasel word identified people, driving is an arguable necessity. EDIT: Added more weasel words.