I agree with your point, but there's a nit I like to pick when the statistics of airline safety comes up. Comparing safety by deaths/injuries per distance trav

I agree with your point, but there's a nit I like to pick when the statistics of airline safety comes up. Comparing safety by deaths/injuries per distance travelled between different modes of transport does not make sense to me. To prove the point imagine some hypothetical mode of travel that can take us to the nearest star - alpha centauri. Now imagine that 50% of people that travel via this mode of transport die, thats obviously not a risk anybody would be willing to take right? But if you use the same statistics as we use for aircraft safety it looks amazing, better than anything else by far. Am I saying that aircraft are unsafe? Not at all - they're still very safe relative to other modes of transport, but the statistics that we commonly calculate to compare them seem totally meaningless to me. Comparing deaths per distance travelled only makes any sense when comparing modes of travel that actually go similar distances. I also acknowledge that this is somewhat of a regional nitpick - it makes a lot more sense to compare aircraft with e.g. cars in the United States because taking an aircraft vs taking a car to travel between different states is actually a choice that many people are making. Whereas I live in a small country where there's very little overlap between aircraft trips and car trips.