5 ms·
Hmm, after looking at that, and always being told that airlines are the safest. I was surprised they are only safest by that one metric (fatalities / distance)
by mpalczewski 5y ago
Hmm, after looking at that, and always being told that airlines are the safest. I was surprised they are only safest by that one metric (fatalities / distance) and not fatalities per trip or fatalities per hour.
- worker767424 5y agoRemember that takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous part of the trip.
- hansthehorse 5y agoI usually hear it stated that it's the first two and last 8 minutes of any flight.
- bittercynic 5y agoSurely the danger is almost always right after the flight ends :-)
- ceejayoz 5y agoThose seem like odd metrics to go by.
- namdnay 5y agoFatalities per hour seems like a reasonable statistic if you want to talk about fear - how likely am I to die in the next 5mn?
- ceejayoz 5y agoIf my goal is "I wish to spend X hours in a form of transit", sure. If I need to get from LA to NYC, though... there's a lot more of those 5 minute periods if I'm driving.
- ghaff 5y agoWhat you probably really want to compare flying and driving is fatalities per trip--for the same trip. As others have noted, a longer trip in a plane is almost certainly safer per mile than a shorter trip given where accidents happen. (And the effect may or may not be further magnified by the fact that I assume the accident rate is higher on small regional jets. Though, on the other hand, they carry fewer people.) On the other hand, driving is probably much more proportional to distance.
- bmitc 5y agoI have personally never liked being blankly told that flying is safer than driving, because I’d like to understand how safe flying is versus driving when something goes wrong.
- ceejayoz 5y agoTwo seconds of inattention in a car is a lot more likely to kill you than it is in a plane. It’s fairly constant risk - going off the shoulder is just a few dozen feet at most. They also tend to be less well maintained, and the other participants less trained.
- bmitc 5y agoThat makes sense at first glance, but it's something I'm in control of. I was even thinking of this before, because the comparison is a little mismatched. I'm 100% likely to be a passenger when I'm in any plane, whereas I'm probably >98% likely to be a driver when I'm in a car. I'm not sure why I was downvoted, because I'm just stating I'd like to understand (data/studies) instead of people's anecdotes and opinions, including my own. My intuition is that car travel has a constant level of risk, whereas plane travel has a level of risk much below that when everything is good but (I'm guessing here) that risk goes much higher than the constant risk of car travel when something goes wrong (failure, human mistake, crash, birds, weather, etc.). I've searched for it before and didn't find anything, but it'd be nice to see any studies that confirm or deny this.
- naniwaduni 5y agoConsidering that ~half of collisions involve multiple vehicles, I suspect your feeling of being in control is a bit of an illusion.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- slavik81 5y ago
- JCharante 5y agoWell what counts as a trip? Surely a trip down the street to a Bodega would be safer than flying across an ocean.