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Whether it’s true or not, I feel like I control my fate when driving a lot more than when flying. I can take precautions (defensive driving, avoiding bad condit

Whether it’s true or not, I feel like I control my fate when driving a lot more than when flying. I can take precautions (defensive driving, avoiding bad conditions, etc.) but have little to no control once I board a plane.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
When someone runs a red light at speed and t-bones you on your left you're dead no matter how defensively you drive. The illusion of control doesn't change your odds much.
- vc8f6vVV 3y ago
  It does change odds. So when considering defensive driving the rule "flying is safer" may not hold.
  - peter422 3y ago
    There is no amount of defensive driving you can do that would make driving safer than flying commercial.
    - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
      That's certainly true in the sense that flying from NYC to LA is 750x safer than doing the same as a road trip, on a fatalities-per-km basis. But on a per-trip basis, boarding that flight will be about equally as safe as taking a 5 km trip by car to the hardware store, and above-average defensive driving can certainly boost that radius considerably, maybe to 50 km. Some would argue the per-trip comparison is invalid, but often the travel distance is not fixed, such as if you were weighing between vacation options of flying to NYC vs camping at a local campsite. On a danger-per-hour-in-vehicle basis, airplanes of course still come out ahead, although not quite as overwhelmingly. NYC to LA is about a 5.5 hour flight; an equivalent drive would be about 350 km, and it will be very hard to match the safety of that flight even with defensive driving. You'd need to drive 70x better than average, even with the fatigue of a 5.5 hour drive.
  - cedilla 3y ago
    Flying is safer by several orders of magnitude. Especially in the US.
    - vc8f6vVV 3y ago
      Let's do some math, shall we? > In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regularly? Let's assume 2 hours a day for 52x5 = 260 working days in a year. So given that we have 43K traffic fatalities per year let's compute fatalities per hour of driving. 100M * 2 * 260 / 43K = 1.2M So we have 1 fatality per 1.2M hours of driving. At the same time we have roughly 1 fatality per 100K hours of flying. Oops! Of course one should consider that: (a) it's 2007 data, it's probably lower now (10 times lower?), (b) we definitely cover longer distances per hour of flying (by the way not that much, 60 mph vs 600 mph is within 10x difference), (c) it's probably all flying, including private, but I'm not considering just public buses either. Add defensive driving though, and it's not that obvious which is safer.
      - hunter2_ 3y ago
        IMHO the comparison is to inform the decision point of whether to fly or drive somewhere, so the inputs should be limited accordingly: exclude drives that couldn't reasonably be flown. Is it safer on average to do a long road trip, or fly? Historical crash data on long road trips (excluding commutes, local errands, etc.) probably doesn't exist, but if it did, that would be very preferable. Perhaps people crash more when driving unfamiliar roads, with additional fatigue of long durations, with additional distraction of kids, etc. Or perhaps routine drives are worse because one lets their guard down!
        vc8f6vVV 3y ago
        Statistics is a tricky thing. There are 43K traffic fatalities in the US per year and 53K deaths from colorectal cancer. Which means chances of dying from colorectal cancer is higher than dying in a traffic accident. Well, over a lifetime, but distribution over age can be different etc. In the same way 43K fatalities are not an even distribution over region, type of driving, destination, age etc. Of course I have to admit that flying commercial airlines is safer by average numbers, in the US and for now. But if we estimate total flying hours as 1.3B/year (http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Documents/Aircraft%20and%20Related/Total%20Fleet/Total%20Aircraft%20Airborne%20Hours%20-%20ALL%20AIRCRAFT.htm http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Docum... times 100 passengers per aircraft) it only takes 1300 deaths per year to make it even with average traffic fatalities. If that flight had been unlucky enough to go down we would have had 177 deaths, already not "orders of magnitude safer" than driving. And the trend is not good. But again, we are comparing apples to oranges. Driving is a very different experience, both long and short trips. Nobody chooses to drive from Boston to LA just out of fear of flying (well, maybe there are exceptions, but "nobody" is still a very accurate word). As for short trips, changes of getting into an accident in urban area driving to the airport is probably higher than driving in the other direction towards your destination. Again, it depends.
- bmitc 3y ago
  Even then, that is a scenario that you can train to look for. I often look both ways before taking off on a green.
mertd 3y ago
I only feel like I control slightly more than 50% of the situation with defensive driving. There's very little you can do for example if someone decides to rear end you.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  Especially since, most of the time, they weren't intending to rear end you and therefore may be going far too fast to reasonably slow down in time. In my town of 1200 we had a death recently where a driver (no seatbelt) was speeding through a 45 MPH road and somehow didn't see the loaded dump truck stopped to turn left at a construction site. Full speed contact, his vehicle veers to the right and into the ditch. He was either killed instantly or when he hit the ditch.
mattmaroon 3y ago
It is true that you control your fate more when driving. Once the door shuts on the plane you have little ability to do anything other than get yourself arrested. That’s part of WHY air travel is safer.
- bmitc 3y ago
  I like to consider what is safer when something goes wromg. Are there statistics that track this across different modes of travel?
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Your car won't fall out of the sky in the event of a malfunction so I guess cars are safer "when something goes wrong"? Then again cars travel with less margin of error to other cars and objects than airplanes.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      An airplane falling out the sky is something like the equivalent of the wheels falling off of a car traveling at speed. It's not that it can't happen, but it's hardly the only possible result of a malfunction.
      - cereal_cable 3y ago
        There's also a giant speed difference plus the fact that a car will decelerate even if uncontrollably for basically any mechanical failure. Even at speed vehicle accidents are quite safe comparatively to a plane that has lost its ability to fly. A plane tends to have all or nothing incidents while vehicles have lots of accidents with a wide variety of severity. Naturally that tends to push aviation towards avoidance of mechanical issues and on cars we are much more tolerant. I've seen people driving cars with their door duck taped on!
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Yes. Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars. There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

When someone runs a red light at speed and t-bones you on your left you're dead no matter how defensively you drive. The illusion of control doesn't change your odds much.

vc8f6vVV 3y ago
It does change odds. So when considering defensive driving the rule "flying is safer" may not hold.
- peter422 3y ago
  There is no amount of defensive driving you can do that would make driving safer than flying commercial.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    That's certainly true in the sense that flying from NYC to LA is 750x safer than doing the same as a road trip, on a fatalities-per-km basis. But on a per-trip basis, boarding that flight will be about equally as safe as taking a 5 km trip by car to the hardware store, and above-average defensive driving can certainly boost that radius considerably, maybe to 50 km. Some would argue the per-trip comparison is invalid, but often the travel distance is not fixed, such as if you were weighing between vacation options of flying to NYC vs camping at a local campsite. On a danger-per-hour-in-vehicle basis, airplanes of course still come out ahead, although not quite as overwhelmingly. NYC to LA is about a 5.5 hour flight; an equivalent drive would be about 350 km, and it will be very hard to match the safety of that flight even with defensive driving. You'd need to drive 70x better than average, even with the fatigue of a 5.5 hour drive.
- cedilla 3y ago
  Flying is safer by several orders of magnitude. Especially in the US.
  - vc8f6vVV 3y ago
    Let's do some math, shall we? > In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regularly? Let's assume 2 hours a day for 52x5 = 260 working days in a year. So given that we have 43K traffic fatalities per year let's compute fatalities per hour of driving. 100M * 2 * 260 / 43K = 1.2M So we have 1 fatality per 1.2M hours of driving. At the same time we have roughly 1 fatality per 100K hours of flying. Oops! Of course one should consider that: (a) it's 2007 data, it's probably lower now (10 times lower?), (b) we definitely cover longer distances per hour of flying (by the way not that much, 60 mph vs 600 mph is within 10x difference), (c) it's probably all flying, including private, but I'm not considering just public buses either. Add defensive driving though, and it's not that obvious which is safer.
    - hunter2_ 3y ago
      IMHO the comparison is to inform the decision point of whether to fly or drive somewhere, so the inputs should be limited accordingly: exclude drives that couldn't reasonably be flown. Is it safer on average to do a long road trip, or fly? Historical crash data on long road trips (excluding commutes, local errands, etc.) probably doesn't exist, but if it did, that would be very preferable. Perhaps people crash more when driving unfamiliar roads, with additional fatigue of long durations, with additional distraction of kids, etc. Or perhaps routine drives are worse because one lets their guard down!
      - vc8f6vVV 3y ago
        Statistics is a tricky thing. There are 43K traffic fatalities in the US per year and 53K deaths from colorectal cancer. Which means chances of dying from colorectal cancer is higher than dying in a traffic accident. Well, over a lifetime, but distribution over age can be different etc. In the same way 43K fatalities are not an even distribution over region, type of driving, destination, age etc. Of course I have to admit that flying commercial airlines is safer by average numbers, in the US and for now. But if we estimate total flying hours as 1.3B/year (http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Documents/Aircraft%20and%20Related/Total%20Fleet/Total%20Aircraft%20Airborne%20Hours%20-%20ALL%20AIRCRAFT.htm http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Docum... times 100 passengers per aircraft) it only takes 1300 deaths per year to make it even with average traffic fatalities. If that flight had been unlucky enough to go down we would have had 177 deaths, already not "orders of magnitude safer" than driving. And the trend is not good. But again, we are comparing apples to oranges. Driving is a very different experience, both long and short trips. Nobody chooses to drive from Boston to LA just out of fear of flying (well, maybe there are exceptions, but "nobody" is still a very accurate word). As for short trips, changes of getting into an accident in urban area driving to the airport is probably higher than driving in the other direction towards your destination. Again, it depends.
bmitc 3y ago
Even then, that is a scenario that you can train to look for. I often look both ways before taking off on a green.

mertd 3y ago

I only feel like I control slightly more than 50% of the situation with defensive driving. There's very little you can do for example if someone decides to rear end you.

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
Especially since, most of the time, they weren't intending to rear end you and therefore may be going far too fast to reasonably slow down in time. In my town of 1200 we had a death recently where a driver (no seatbelt) was speeding through a 45 MPH road and somehow didn't see the loaded dump truck stopped to turn left at a construction site. Full speed contact, his vehicle veers to the right and into the ditch. He was either killed instantly or when he hit the ditch.

mattmaroon 3y ago

It is true that you control your fate more when driving. Once the door shuts on the plane you have little ability to do anything other than get yourself arrested. That’s part of WHY air travel is safer.

bmitc 3y ago
I like to consider what is safer when something goes wromg. Are there statistics that track this across different modes of travel?
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Your car won't fall out of the sky in the event of a malfunction so I guess cars are safer "when something goes wrong"? Then again cars travel with less margin of error to other cars and objects than airplanes.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    An airplane falling out the sky is something like the equivalent of the wheels falling off of a car traveling at speed. It's not that it can't happen, but it's hardly the only possible result of a malfunction.
    - cereal_cable 3y ago
      There's also a giant speed difference plus the fact that a car will decelerate even if uncontrollably for basically any mechanical failure. Even at speed vehicle accidents are quite safe comparatively to a plane that has lost its ability to fly. A plane tends to have all or nothing incidents while vehicles have lots of accidents with a wide variety of severity. Naturally that tends to push aviation towards avoidance of mechanical issues and on cars we are much more tolerant. I've seen people driving cars with their door duck taped on!
- TylerE 3y ago
  Yes. Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars. There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.