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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 ap
by 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 agoIs 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 agoDefinitely! 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.