Countries where flying is dangerous | Hacker News Reader

Countries where flying is dangerous

economist.com

35 pointssomberi17 comments

> Overall, airplanes are a remarkably safe means of travel. Even on carriers registered in highly mountainous and desperately poor Nepal, which truly is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to fly in, just one out of every 60,000 passengers has died in aviation accidents since 2000.

Wouldn't it make more sense to measure in number of crashes per flights instead of number of passengers?

Not if you want to compare safety between different transport methods: train, car, bike, plane, elevator, motorcycle, walking, etc.

That would make small countries look unfairly safer because of their shorter flights. Maybe deaths per passenger-kilometer? Unless the duration of the flight doesn't really affect the risk.

The duration of the flight can be ignored. Almost all accidents happen during take-off or landing which is why statistics usually refer to the number of passengers.

Edit: Data to back it up: http://www.1001crash.com/index-page-statistique-lg-2-numpage...

Makes sense. Takeoff and landing are the most critical phases of flight (much less time to correct mistakes).

On the other hand, the risk of driving from New York to Boston is drastically different from the disk of driving New York to LA. So if you want to make a safety comparison between different transit systems, looking at deaths per passenger mile makes sense for the big picture.

But if all you're looking at is the risk per flight like this, it's like you said, takeoff and landing are where crashes happen regardless of distance.

If I have to move my piano 120 feet down the street, cars are considerably safer than planes.

It's very difficult to compare miles traveled. Even when comparing a cross country trip, how safe am I driving if I come anywhere close to US airline's safety standards: very well maintained car, never drive tired, avoid bad road conditions, etc...?

Yes, thank you for saying this. You'll often see the relative safety of different modes of travel compared using passenger miles. Passenger miles are an important consideration for some modes of travel, but not air travel.

This wouldn't work for Nepal, where the flights are short from a 2D perspective, but are absolutely necessary from a 3D one.

Like flying into Kai Tak, but significantly scarier?

I propose that the measurement be in crashes per aircraft type.

The "just" before the "one out of every 60,000 passengers has died" is rather problematic IMHO.

There's also the climate. Indonesia is one of the rainiest places in the world.[1] It's not just more dangerous to fly through, the constant heavy rain accelerates deterioration of the aircraft, requiring more frequent and diligent maintenance. They are boats that fly.

[1] http://www.climate-charts.com/images/world-rainfall-map.png

You don't even want think about what happens to a helicopter in a sudden torrential downpour. It's not a pleasant experience even if you can walk away from it.

I think the natural log scale imparts a bias to the "The rich are different" chart.

Most countries are in the "rich" blob there, and there are very few outliers.

There are also extremely rich outliers with (comparatively) large numbers of airfare deaths.

As noted by another commeter, Indonesia receives tremendous amounts of rainfall, with well-documented consequences for aircraft and flights.

All-told, I think the way the data are presented in this article is not suitable for making conclusive statements like "it's dangerous to fly in $PLACE".

I'm not sure if being rich has anything to do with it. I think it probably has more to do with the type of flying. Even though they talk about "airlines", the stats are really just for "scheduled air services" as far as I can tell. Indonesia has a huge number of scheduled air taxi services compared to countries like the USA, Canada or Europe. So it would be more fair to compare the stats with the air taxi operators in rich countries, which have a much poorer safety record. There's a big difference between landing a two-crew 737 on a 2 mile runway with a Cat III ILS and SOPs, and a 250 hour wonder landing a bush plane on the side of a mountain.

Look up "worst place to be a pilot" on youtube.

Yes, I find that data very unconvincing. I'd love to see some statistical tools identify how much GDP explains the crash variation.

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