2 ms·
GA is actually less safe than driving. It's about as safe as riding a motorcycle: https://inspire.eaa.org/2017/05/11/how-safe-is-it/ https://inspire.eaa.org/201
by carabiner 5y ago
GA is actually less safe than driving. It's about as safe as riding a motorcycle: https://inspire.eaa.org/2017/05/11/how-safe-is-it/ https://inspire.eaa.org/2017/05/11/how-safe-is-it/
GA aircraft crash every day in the US. They don't make the news outside of aviation circles because only 1-2 people are affected. Often the occupants survive.
- owenversteeg 5y agoI'm not a huge fan of those statistics because "deaths per 100k hours" isn't really an appropriate way to compare driving vs. motorcycles vs. GA. If you're comparing driving vs. GA, I think one possible appropriate measure is "deaths per mile"; let's say the average speed of a GA craft is 150mph and the average speed of a car is 37mph, that means that GA is 6 times more deadly than driving a similar distance. Even that is a flawed measure, however. Few people use GA as a replacement for driving. I think in general, an appropriate measure to use is to estimate the (negative or positive) expected DALYs associated with an activity over a lifetime. That said, this measure does (in my opinion) penalize moderately-unhealthy things worse than very risky activities. For example, BASE jumping has a fatality rate of 0.04% per jump. If you do a handful of crazy BASE jumps, that's only a slight DALY difference - very roughly comparable to not brushing or flossing as far as I can tell from this study [0]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4484374/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4484374/