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 pl

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.