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Airline ------------ Total number of global flights per year: ~38.9 Million Total deaths over the last decade (3,562) -> 21.2 deaths per million trips Car

Airline ------------ Total number of global flights per year: ~38.9 Million Total deaths over the last decade (3,562) -> 21.2 deaths per million trips Cars ------------ Total number of driving trips per year US: 227 Billion (using your number of 43K deaths per year) -> 1.9 deaths / million trips Wow, I'm surprised but actually airline travel is less safe then driving. Links: - https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-number-of-flights/#:~:text=Global%20air%20traffic%20%2D%20number%20of%20flights%202004%2D2024&text=The%20number%20of%20flights%20performed,to%2016.9%20million%20in%202020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-.... - https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-traffic-fatalities/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra...

gbear605 2y ago
Deaths per trip is a bad comparison. As you can see from those numbers, Americans take about 1000 car trips per year and many fewer plane trips (hard to get exact numbers based on that since it’s global and planes can have dozens-hundreds of people).
avar 2y ago
It makes no sense to look at number of flights for a comparison. You need to look at passenger miles.
- hunter2_ 2y ago
  You need to look at hours invested. If I'm planning to go away for a week, I'm choosing whether to sit in a car for 12 hours or airports+airplanes for 12 hours -- these are the equivalent options for how to spend my time away from home, so between these, how much safer is one over the other? Said another way, compare "trips by plane" against "a set of car trips whose average duration matches that of trips by plane."
  - gruez 2y ago
    >[...] these are the equivalent options for how to spend my time away from home No they're not. If you're in San Fransisco for instance, a 12 hour drive maybe gets you to LA, Vegas, and maybe salt lake city. It can't even get you to Seattle or Phoenix. Meanwhile even if you factor in getting to the airport 3 hours before departure, 1 hour to get to the airport, and 1 hour to get to your final destination, that leaves you with 7 hours of flight time. That's enough for a direct flight anywhere in the lower 48 states, and as well as many cities in Canada and Mexico.
    - hunter2_ 2y ago
      If I have a certain amount of time to spend and want a reasonable ratio of travel time to time-at-destination, some ratio that I prefer regardless of mode of travel, those are indeed the options I can choose from (e.g., driving to the next state or flying across the country). There will be many factors leading to a decision of which option to select, and if I want travel safety to be a factor, then the safety stats need to be presented as I'm describing.
    - NekkoDroid 2y ago
      Fuck, in 12 hours time I can get from Germany to USA Atlanta no problem, probably still 1-2 hours extra time.
samatman 2y ago
"Per trip" is an utterly meaningless way of looking at the data. Some car trips last ten minutes and a 10 or 12 hour flight isn't uncommon. You know for a fact that it's more dangerous to drive from NYC to Miami than it is to drive to the grocery store and back, so why would you use a meaningless statistic like this? I would say the most sensible is "per passenger hour", followed by "per passenger mile", since in some cases one might be choosing between driving somewhere and flying there. By both of these metrics, airplanes are much safer than cars.
- tstrimple 2y ago
  > I would say the most sensible is "per passenger hour", followed by "per passenger mile" Not trying to be contrarian or anything but I'm curious why. Another comment mentioned the material difference in available options between comparing an 8 hour flight to an 8 hour drive. In my mind, the only meaningful metric then would be the "per passenger mile". This should be emphasized by the fact that there are destinations that literally no amount of driven miles will get you to. The utility provided from 8 hours of flight versus 8 hours of driving are so drastically different I can't imagine how you'd compare them. 8 hours of flight will let you visit roughly a quarter of the world. 8 hours of driving won't even get you a quarter of the way across the US.
kayodelycaon 2y ago
You're calculating per trip, which is very misleading. Each flight two orders of magnitude more people on it. You want per person per trip to actually calculate an individual's risk on a single trip. Then you need to account for distance or time. If I had to guess, that's three to four orders of magnitude more time or distance per trip.
- rapatel0 2y ago
  Actually, I think it's a fair comparison for several reasons: - The decision of "is it safe to take this trip or not" is tied to the trip. Once you get in a plane or get in a car, you've made the safety decision. It's not really reversable for flight, and it's only partially reversable if you're driving a car. - The risk in air travel is largely dominated by the takeoff, landing and quality of plane production and maintenance. It's not strongly tied to distance or flight time. Once you're in the air, I speculate that there are fewer opportunities for adverse events then a car. To put it another way, flying from SF to San Diego is not 2x risker then flying from SF to LA despite it being more than 2x the distance and flight time. Compare this to a car, where you encounter many more cars in close proximity, many more obstacles (stop lights, pedestrians, turns). A 15 minute ride to get groceries likely has 10x the number of opportunities for adverse events as compared to an airplane. Car risk is denser and linear, where as flight risk seems more constant. - Number of people on a plane doesn't really affect the safety of a trip. (saw this in some other comments) However, I do recognize that commercial airline deaths are a better metric for general travel comparison. Though I would use the global data. We do know of two fatal crashes of the Boeing planes in the last decade so if you're cherry picking the US data then you are also introducing bias. This is especially true given my earlier point about risks associated with plane quality.
triceratops 2y ago
Are you comparing global flights to US driving?
cge 2y ago
In addition to the other points brought up, you're comparing global flight statistics with US driving statistics. Fatal commercial aviation accident rates are heavily region dependent. If I recall correctly, the number of fatal aviation accidents on scheduled US commercial flights over the last decade is zero. Meanwhile, some other regions are vastly less safe: for example, while this was some number of years ago, I remember a statistic of flights in Africa accounting for single-digit percentages of global flights and a quarter of passenger fatalities.
- tstrimple 2y ago
  Most US aviation deaths are from general aviation, not commercial. As you've pointed out, commercial flights in the US are far, far safer than driving almost no matter how you want to cherry pick stats. General aviation has an accident rate equivalent to if not higher than automobile accidents. Commercial airline practices and procedures largely work and are very effective at reducing casualties. But some of these small general aviation airports don't even have full time staff coordinating landings and departures and you have to handle that yourself and hope anyone else landing at and taking off from that airport are on the right frequencies. After listening to a few too many aviation accident breakdowns and the reasons behind them, I'm honestly surprised the general population doesn't hear more about these shenanigans and the dangers surrounding the hobby. It's way too easy to mix the commercial airline safety records with general aviation and have a false sense of security around those types of flights. It's one thing when an inexperienced pilot kills themselves through neglect and incompetence, but a very different sort of impact when looking at these reckless pilots who get others killed. Think of any celebrity who has died in an aviation incident from Denver to Kobe and they are all general aviation accidents. Small planes with less experienced or complacent pilots.

gbear605 2y ago

Deaths per trip is a bad comparison. As you can see from those numbers, Americans take about 1000 car trips per year and many fewer plane trips (hard to get exact numbers based on that since it’s global and planes can have dozens-hundreds of people).

avar 2y ago

It makes no sense to look at number of flights for a comparison. You need to look at passenger miles.

hunter2_ 2y ago
You need to look at hours invested. If I'm planning to go away for a week, I'm choosing whether to sit in a car for 12 hours or airports+airplanes for 12 hours -- these are the equivalent options for how to spend my time away from home, so between these, how much safer is one over the other? Said another way, compare "trips by plane" against "a set of car trips whose average duration matches that of trips by plane."
- gruez 2y ago
  >[...] these are the equivalent options for how to spend my time away from home No they're not. If you're in San Fransisco for instance, a 12 hour drive maybe gets you to LA, Vegas, and maybe salt lake city. It can't even get you to Seattle or Phoenix. Meanwhile even if you factor in getting to the airport 3 hours before departure, 1 hour to get to the airport, and 1 hour to get to your final destination, that leaves you with 7 hours of flight time. That's enough for a direct flight anywhere in the lower 48 states, and as well as many cities in Canada and Mexico.
  - hunter2_ 2y ago
    If I have a certain amount of time to spend and want a reasonable ratio of travel time to time-at-destination, some ratio that I prefer regardless of mode of travel, those are indeed the options I can choose from (e.g., driving to the next state or flying across the country). There will be many factors leading to a decision of which option to select, and if I want travel safety to be a factor, then the safety stats need to be presented as I'm describing.
  - NekkoDroid 2y ago
    Fuck, in 12 hours time I can get from Germany to USA Atlanta no problem, probably still 1-2 hours extra time.

samatman 2y ago

"Per trip" is an utterly meaningless way of looking at the data. Some car trips last ten minutes and a 10 or 12 hour flight isn't uncommon. You know for a fact that it's more dangerous to drive from NYC to Miami than it is to drive to the grocery store and back, so why would you use a meaningless statistic like this? I would say the most sensible is "per passenger hour", followed by "per passenger mile", since in some cases one might be choosing between driving somewhere and flying there. By both of these metrics, airplanes are much safer than cars.

tstrimple 2y ago
> I would say the most sensible is "per passenger hour", followed by "per passenger mile" Not trying to be contrarian or anything but I'm curious why. Another comment mentioned the material difference in available options between comparing an 8 hour flight to an 8 hour drive. In my mind, the only meaningful metric then would be the "per passenger mile". This should be emphasized by the fact that there are destinations that literally no amount of driven miles will get you to. The utility provided from 8 hours of flight versus 8 hours of driving are so drastically different I can't imagine how you'd compare them. 8 hours of flight will let you visit roughly a quarter of the world. 8 hours of driving won't even get you a quarter of the way across the US.

kayodelycaon 2y ago

You're calculating per trip, which is very misleading. Each flight two orders of magnitude more people on it. You want per person per trip to actually calculate an individual's risk on a single trip. Then you need to account for distance or time. If I had to guess, that's three to four orders of magnitude more time or distance per trip.

rapatel0 2y ago
Actually, I think it's a fair comparison for several reasons: - The decision of "is it safe to take this trip or not" is tied to the trip. Once you get in a plane or get in a car, you've made the safety decision. It's not really reversable for flight, and it's only partially reversable if you're driving a car. - The risk in air travel is largely dominated by the takeoff, landing and quality of plane production and maintenance. It's not strongly tied to distance or flight time. Once you're in the air, I speculate that there are fewer opportunities for adverse events then a car. To put it another way, flying from SF to San Diego is not 2x risker then flying from SF to LA despite it being more than 2x the distance and flight time. Compare this to a car, where you encounter many more cars in close proximity, many more obstacles (stop lights, pedestrians, turns). A 15 minute ride to get groceries likely has 10x the number of opportunities for adverse events as compared to an airplane. Car risk is denser and linear, where as flight risk seems more constant. - Number of people on a plane doesn't really affect the safety of a trip. (saw this in some other comments) However, I do recognize that commercial airline deaths are a better metric for general travel comparison. Though I would use the global data. We do know of two fatal crashes of the Boeing planes in the last decade so if you're cherry picking the US data then you are also introducing bias. This is especially true given my earlier point about risks associated with plane quality.

triceratops 2y ago

Are you comparing global flights to US driving?

cge 2y ago

In addition to the other points brought up, you're comparing global flight statistics with US driving statistics. Fatal commercial aviation accident rates are heavily region dependent. If I recall correctly, the number of fatal aviation accidents on scheduled US commercial flights over the last decade is zero. Meanwhile, some other regions are vastly less safe: for example, while this was some number of years ago, I remember a statistic of flights in Africa accounting for single-digit percentages of global flights and a quarter of passenger fatalities.

tstrimple 2y ago
Most US aviation deaths are from general aviation, not commercial. As you've pointed out, commercial flights in the US are far, far safer than driving almost no matter how you want to cherry pick stats. General aviation has an accident rate equivalent to if not higher than automobile accidents. Commercial airline practices and procedures largely work and are very effective at reducing casualties. But some of these small general aviation airports don't even have full time staff coordinating landings and departures and you have to handle that yourself and hope anyone else landing at and taking off from that airport are on the right frequencies. After listening to a few too many aviation accident breakdowns and the reasons behind them, I'm honestly surprised the general population doesn't hear more about these shenanigans and the dangers surrounding the hobby. It's way too easy to mix the commercial airline safety records with general aviation and have a false sense of security around those types of flights. It's one thing when an inexperienced pilot kills themselves through neglect and incompetence, but a very different sort of impact when looking at these reckless pilots who get others killed. Think of any celebrity who has died in an aviation incident from Denver to Kobe and they are all general aviation accidents. Small planes with less experienced or complacent pilots.