Feel free to tear into this. I
know it's flawed. But FWIW here's some back-of-the-napkin math I put together when discussing in an e-mail thread. Note however that it's slightly conservative WRT road fatalities. You can choose not to drive drunk, drive defensively, etc, and substantially reduce your risk because a large fraction of deaths are the drunk and other reckless drivers themselves.
> > > > > In 2017 there were 0.06 deaths per million flights of large,
> > > > > commercial airliners:
> > > > >
> > > > > https://www.reuters.com/article/us-aviation-safety/2017-safest-year-on-record-for-commercial-passenger-air-travel-groups-idUSKBN1EQ17L
> > > > >
> > > > > By contrast, in 2009 white people averaged 1,500 trips per year:
> > > > >
> > > > > https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/2010cpr/chap1.cfm
> > > > >
> > > > > Multiply 1,500 trips/person by 360 million people (2009 U.S.
> > > > > population), divide ~35,000 road fatalities by the number of trips,
> > > > > and multiple by 1,000,000, and you literally get 0.06 fatalities per
> > > > > million trips. Even if the numbers are slightly inaccurate
> > > > > (different years, different demographics, wrong cohorts), the point
> > > > > is that strictly speaking flying really isn't that much safer than
> > > > > driving. Certainly nothing like the several orders of magnitude
> > > > > claimed; not when using the more meaningful metric of fatalities per
> > > > > trip.
> ...
> > > > I don't think that normalizes for the number of people on the plane,
> > > > though.
> > >
> > > Hmmmmm. Good point... I think.
> > >
> > like, does a flight of 100 people count as a single "trip", or as 100? If
> > it only counts as one, then you should normalize, because I'm sure they
> > don't count each crash as a single fatality.
>
> Here are numbers from 2018 from the original source:
>
> https://news.aviation-safety.net/2019/01/01/aviation-safety-network-releases-2018-airliner-accident-statistics/
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SDp7p1y6m7N5xD5_fpOkYOrJvd68V7iy6etXy2cetb8/edit#gid=1448957446
>
> That's 0.39 fatal *accidents* per million flights, based on 15 fatal
> flights and 38,100,0000 departures. There were 556 total deaths from those
> 15 fatal flights.[1]
>
> The question, is how many passengers on average per flight. If we divide
> the number of deaths (556) by the number of fatal flights (15), we get 37
> on average. If we divide the number of total passengers for 2018 (4.3
> billion[2]) by the total number of flights (38,100,000), we get 112
> passengers on average.
>
> So average number of fatalities per departure could be somewhere between
> 0.01 and 0.003. Definitely lower than 0.06 but nowhere close to 750x
> lower.
>
> [1] I'm using passenger+cargo because there's only one figure given for
> total number of departures and I assume that's the aggregate. Counting
> just passengers we get 0.36 instead of 0.39 which isn't much of a
> difference, probably because cargo flights have only 2 people on board.
> Still, it would be nice to know the total number of passenger-only
> departures.
>
> [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-passenger-traffic-globally/