Related information: In the US (maybe everywhere?) air travel is safer than railroad travel.
The railroad experience is usually much better though, I agree (compared to economy class).
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
The railroad experience is usually much better though, I agree (compared to economy class).
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
This owes to the fact that the stat compares deaths per mile, but the real risk in a plane is not measured in miles, but in takeoff/landing/pressurization cycles. Whether the plane then flies for 10 miles or 5000, the risk is pretty much the same. And so if you mask out the danger by looking at deaths/mile then yeah - they're safer. But if you look at it in terms of 'what are my odds of dying on an average trip' - then they're much less safe than driving.
You can really intuit this by imagining some ultra-high risk interstellar starship. If it traveled quadrillions upon quadrillions of miles, but 99% of them randomly blew up and killed everybody on board, then it'd still be far safer than driving in terms of deaths/mile. The deaths/mile datum is not really very useful for modes of transport where the risk models are very different, and that's very much the case for driving vs flying.
> But if you look at it in terms of 'what are my odds of dying on an average trip' - then they're much less safe than driving.
But is that an interesting stat to look at? You would need to multiply that number by the number of trips, to get a useful measure of risk.
On a first level analysis, vehicles are already slightly safer than jets on a trip for trip basis. But this dramatically understates the actual difference, because the mortality numbers I'm using for vehicles are per person, not per fatal incident. In other words 1 PERSON dies per 5.17 million vehicle trips. And I'm comparing that against one entire JET 'dying' per 4.94 million flights, which is generally going to have tens to hundreds of people on it. If you do an apples to apples comparison in terms of trips (as would be the case if somebody just replaced their car with a private plane), vehicles would be orders of magnitude safer than jets, trip for trip.
[1] - https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2024-releases/2024-02-28-0...
[2] - https://newsroom.aaa.com/2015/04/new-study-reveals-much-moto...
[3] - https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
I've flown first class and it is still a miserable fucking experience. I hate airplanes.