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Comment by lightsighter | Hacker News Reader

We can compare against another mode of human-controlled transportation. There are 1.37 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles driving in the US [1]. In comparison, there are ~0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles flying. Converting into the same units, there are 137 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles driving. So you are 685X more likely to die while driving/riding in a car than flying. That's almost three orders of magnitude worse! Humans are pretty terrible drivers in comparison to how good we are at flying.

[1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

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Pilots have mandatory sleep cycles, drug tests, significantly greater initial training, backup pilots, and dedicated airspace. If you could wipe out all of the tired, drunk/high, and teenagers from the road, I bet the driving stats would look significantly better.

We don't ask pilots to do basically anything. They are given dedicated lanes and have constant radar monitoring them anywhere near an airport where they may be expected to somehow come in contact with another plane.

Compared to sharing roads going opposite directions at high speeds inches away from each other, it is no contest that humans driving is the much more impressive number.

You should compare with GA to get closer to apples-and-apples. Comparing a highly regulated industry with everybody from 16 year olds to 90 year olds over and extreme range of experience and health isn't going to give you a useful result.

And even GA pilots are probably in much better physical shape than the general public that drives cars.

Flying (the type done commercially) is a much easier task than driving, well maybe except for takeoff and landing where the majority of miles are not spent. The pilot can basically sleep most of the way.

This is a great example of why relative risk matters so little when the absolute risk is so low.

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