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Comment by quantumfissure | Hacker News Reader

There is a media difference though since the DCA crash. Military and small planes (<10 PAX) crash all the time. We just never heard about it until after January. My point is the same, media sees crash, tries to drive clickage.

On a personal level, I know three people that have died in small plane crashes in the Alaska wilderness in the last 15 years, which is so common that it didn't even get on local news. I have acquaintances that were in involved in two others elsewhere over the last few years. Small planes are unbelievably dangerous. Commercial jets, not so much.

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Small planes are about twice as safe per mile as motorcycles, all-cause to all-cause.

Now, there’s planes running out of fuel and drunk driving on cycles that some operators might choose to exclude from their own risk calculations, but it’s a little over one order of magnitude riskier than cars.

Whether that’s unbelievably dangerous is up to personal judgment.

> My point is the same, media sees crash, tries to drive clickage.

In 2012, in a rush to break the news, WGN 9 in Chicago mistook the set of Chicago Fire tv show for a real crash.

https://q1057.com/news-anchor-mistakes-movie-set-for-plane-c...

https://metro.co.uk/2012/12/01/plane-crash-telly-as-chicago-...

> Military and small planes (<10 PAX) crash all the time. We just never heard about it until after January.

We don't hear about military jet crashes unless they're F-35s. The controversial jet gets coverage because it gets eyeballs from people satisfying their confirmation bias. These are never put into context of course.

> The F-16 has been involved in over 670 hull-loss accidents as of January 2020.[312][313]

Fighter jets are simply dangerous, period. They're meant to be flown right at the bleeding edge, accidents are inevitable. But every time an F-35 crashes, the media makes a big deal out of it and idiots see that as confirmation of their belief that the F-35 is bad. Even if the F-35 is bad, it crashing sometimes wouldn't be evidence of that. Occasional crashes are just what happens when fighter jets get flown a lot. It's going to happen whether the jet is good or bad.

Having flown tactical jets off an aircraft carrier into Afghanistan . . . you seem to be conflating "dangerous" with "inherently unforgiving." Flying jets in combat against a peer foe is dangerous. Flying them in peacetime is inherently unforgiving. "Dangerous" occurs when I as an aviator can be taken out by something not under my control or that of my pilot or fellow aircrew.

The reason verbiage matters is because many people fear flying because they look at it as some kind of gamble as opposed to something where risks can be mitigated down quite a bit by the act of being safety-conscious. Even flying multi-plane low-levels or opposed large force exercises are not "dangerous" per se, so long as everyone plays by the rules and takes it seriously. Civil aviation is so safe because of a culture of making it safe.

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