So, first I hope this question fits this sub. I’ve often heard that sentance. But how has it been determined?
Like, is it just about the raw number of deaths? In which case, the argument doesn’t exactly land well since we’re in planes a very small part of our lives.
Or has it been calculated that on average, a second spent on a plane is safer than a second spent in a car? In which case it would truly be safer.
In: Other
Planes travel long distances and the “risky” part is generally take off and landing, when they “crash” most people survive on average, so per mile travelled flying is the safest, but it is more complicated when you talk about per journey.
It’s often projected to the number of trips. Like, each time you get in a car/plane you roll a wheel of fortune to decide if you get out of it alive. The other popular metric is incidents per distance traveled, which is similar to your time based idea but compensates better to the giant speed difference between the two vehicles.
Note: these apply to commercial pilots. Getting into Bob’s Cessna for a short hop to your favorite fishing hole is a lot riskier, IIRC it is a lot closer to road accident rate.
It’s generally counted per “passenger mile”.
In the United States there are 0.2 deaths per 10 billion miles travelled by air.
For cars, that number is 150 deaths per 10 billion miles travelled.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States)
It’s [deaths per passenger mile](https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/), so what your chance of dying is if you take the same trip by car, plane, or whatever.
The comparison for safety usually uses the distance. So, for instance, it is safer to travel 100 miles by plane than by car.
Now, it might be more dangerous to fly 1,000 miles than to drive a quarter mile to the gas station, but these two acts are incomparable. You’d never fly 1,000 miles to go to the gas station.
The second one. The death rates for flying on an airliner is 0.2 deaths for every 10 billion passenger miles (at least according to Wikipedia) and for cars it’s 150 per 10 billion passenger miles. Planes have a lot of redundancies and the training to fly an airliner is much better than learning to drive from your family, who may or may not be terrible drivers.
The last fatal incident involving a commercial airline that occurred in the United States was in 2018 when a fan blade came apart on Southwest Flight 1380 and shrapnel penetrated the cabin, killing 1 person. This incident ended an almost decade long streak of no fatalities on US airlines with the short landing of Asian Airlines flight 214 in 2013 resulting in 3 fatalities. So in the last 11 years there’s only been 4 fatalities on commercial flights in the United States across billions of passengers annually.
In contrast, there’s approximately 35,000 fatal car crashes in the US every year, so in the same time span as it took to accumulate 4 fatalities in aviation there’s been almost 100,000 times more fatal automotive accidents.
[https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/](https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/)
It looks like the data is based on death per miles traveled. This makes sense if you’re trying to determine whether you should take a flight vs. road trip to a destination. Flying is certainly much safer than driving based on this criteria.
Interestingly, the article states that “forty percent of all air travel deaths in this century happened in 2001, the year of the September 11 terrorist attacks.”
It’s average deaths is the lowest of essentially any form of transport, your viewing the statistics slightly wrong.
You might only fly a few times in your life. However, millions of people fly each day. Across an average year, a couple hundred people die as the result of accidents involving planes, globally. In 2021 the number of airline fatalities was 176.
7300 pedestrians are struck and killed in the US every year. That’s people not even driving dying to cars. 43000 die per year in car accidents.
If you take those, and then look at the number of cars and the number of flights, we get that 0.05 people died per million fliers in 2021. That’s 1 in 20 million yearly. It’s 128 people per million people yearly for cars in the US alone. That’s about 1 in 8000 people yearly.
Flights are exceedingly safe in comparison.
Yes and no.
It’s the safest but it’s not just inherently the safest. It’s the safest because it’s where there is most scrutiny. Of we worried about train crashes as much as we do about plane crashes, then trains would be way way safer than planes.
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