People are seriously concerned with aircraft near misses when we let cars kill 45,000 Americans a year. Absurdity.
16% are pedestrians. They usually get hit from behind, and even if they don't, almost always at night.
16% are motorcycles. I ride. I love riding, but the reason for that statistic is obvious. There's zero safety margin when you're on one.
Finally, the average death count from a vehicle accident is like 1.2. The average death count from two planes having an accident is like 600. The reason this all matters is because there are several orders magnitude _more_ car journeys than there are airplane journeys in any given year.
You can't compare them 1:1 and the relative differences matter more than the relative similarities.
You can compare them. Ok if you are being pedantic you need to compare the airline, route, plane model and weather characteristic's with an equivalent car journey route, car model, mechanical condition and driver experience and mental fortitude.
But in general planes are way safer than cars.
If you are 40, perfect vision, sober as a saint in a modern safe car and drive mostly on highways at safe speeds you are still safer in a plane.
Ok if you are being pedantic you need to compare the airline, route, plane model and weather characteristic's with an equivalent car journey route, car model, mechanical condition and driver experience and mental fortitude.
If that’s wrong, then explain which pilot + aircraft combo you think is equivalent to the “typical” suburban car journey.
Walking. We used to be able to walk places before we redesigned everything for cars. Walking is safer than driving.
> The average death count from two planes having an accident is like 600
Do you realize, that your "average" death count has literally never happened in aircraft accidents?
Its...not. If I had to guess averages, the median is probably closer to 3, the mean probably under 10.
Most planes aren't commercial passenger airliners, and that's even more true of most planes involved in accidents.
It would be different if it were the same exact group of people and the same budget who are in charge of plane safety, as those in charge of the car safety. We can then scold them for wasting time on planes and told them to shift focus to cars instead.
It would be useful if the readily mechanizable aspects of ATC-piloting and driving were done by machine but with human-in-the-loop. The fixations with completely human, manual processes and the leap to full automation are both too risky. There is plenty of middle-ground to derisk and remove points where human-error is mostly likely to occur. TCAS has been an excellent aid. Perhaps an automotive "TCAS" would also be useful.
Forward Collision Warning systems and automatic emergency braking are becoming common in new cars. The problem and solution spaces are pretty different, so I don't think applying TCAS directly would be helpful --- I don't think there's a chance of cars having transponders anytime soon, and certainly deer, cyclists and pedestrians are unlikely to participate in an active transponder system, and there's no opportunity for cars to pull up or sink. At the same time, TCAS does not instruct to reduce or increase horizontal speed.
Meanwhile across many thousands of miles and a few different makes of AEB I've never once encountered an actual false positive. Every engagement has been pretty reasonable to me.
At parking speeds though, it would regularly emergency brake to save bushy flowers encroaching into the driveway, or one, it tried to save a driveway from being backed into (there was some weird pavement angle).
Maybe if you had AEB and FCW you wouldn't have had those accidents in the first place. Or did you not have working feet and eyes at the time and only recently got those installed? You even acknowledged you've had multiple collisions, did you not learn when getting your license? Did you not learn on the first accident? How many collisions should be expected for people to learn?
I'll be more clear. If your AEB is engaging while driving on the roads, you're probably driving unsafely. If you're worried about your AEB triggering often, you should probably adjust your driving because it's probably pretty unsafe.
I'll grant there's probably a few models with twitchy AEB systems, but almost every overly sensitive AEB I've ever heard about is either a Tesla with phantom braking or overly sensitive in tight parking conditions, which once again shouldn't really be a safety problem as that should be low speed. And even then those are really only a few older models, anything made in the last several years seems pretty solid to me from the several cars I've driven with it.
Just hearing the stories the people around me tell me to do with the computerized features like AEB and other stuff makes me keep my car purchases firmly in the 1990s, which coincidentally is one of the best decades for cars.
Like the woz says "never trust a computer you can't throw out a window"
This is exactly the case. In the US we have the Department of Transportation that governs automobile transportation as well as air travel (and also trains and boats).