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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918665

I didn't bother calculating the rate for driving to the airport, but eyeballing the figures for cars, it's probably as about as dangerous if you assume that the 737 Max were 10x more dangerous than average flying. Cars are still more dangerous than planes on a per-mile basis, but at the same time you're also traveling less miles on the car trip compared to the flight. Regardless if you hit a 5 minute traffic jam, you'd lose about the same amount of life as flying in a 737 Max (again, assuming it's 10x more dangerous than regular air travel).

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Per mile is a ridiculous metric when comparing two totally different modes of transportation. Think about how many car trips a single flight represents.

I explicitly addressed this in my last comment:

>Cars are still more dangerous than planes on a per-mile basis, but at the same time you're also traveling less miles on the car trip compared to the flight.

Why would I care about per mile stats? What matters to me is the safety of the contraption and crew I'm putting my faith in each time I step foot into the machine. Airplanes shouldn't get a higher safety rating simply because the trips are 100x longer on average.

>Airplanes shouldn't get a higher safety rating simply because the trips are 100x longer on average.

Note that you can take those stats and multiply by how many miles you're traveling to figure out your per-incident risk (ie. risk for the whole flight). Even if you do that you'll find they're quite safe, compared to other activities you do every day. Sure, the averages might not be applicable for edge cases (eg. very short flights), but for the average traveler it's a pretty good estimate.

You would care because, presumably, you're deciding on a mode of transport to travel those miles. Otherwise, the measure is deaths per trip, which would prompt the conclusion that cars are thousands of times safer than air travel.

It doesn't work that way. When I fly, it's typically the only feasible option. I've never in my life sat down and calculated flying vs driving. It's more something like >400 miles, then fly, otherwise drive.

Sounds like actual risk matters little to you and you care far more about feelings of risk.

statistic should be per hour spent in the transport, not per mile

1. That doesn't make any sense. You're not flying as some sort of recreational activity to pass the time. You're flying because you want to get from point a to point b. If you're making that journey, it makes sense to compare which method is the safest for the entire journey, not for 1 hour of it.

2. Even if we ignored the above, applying this adjustment doesn't change the conclusion that planes are safer than driving by a fair margin. The 737 MAX cruise at 521 mph. Cars top out at around 60mph. If we round that off to planes being 10x faster and normalize for that (ie. 10x the death rate), you still get 0.57 for a car vs <0.01 for a plane.

I'm really not sure you can amortize deaths like that to individuals. Folks are dead or they're not.

And the door either has a goat or a car. But before the event takes place (opening the door), it is perfectly reasonable to do risk analysis with odds and fractional goats.

Chances of dying because you flew on a MAX are still insanely low. Maybe worse than if it was an A320, but the absolute numbers have so many zeros between the decimal point and the value that they're basically the same: 0.

Yes you can. People take minuscule amounts of risk everyday, by driving or even walking. While I agree there's a point where the risk isn't worth it even if the expected value is positive (eg. russian roulette to win a billion dollars), but we're nowhere near that point with 737 Max risk.

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