[johnpaulett]

Fatal Accident Rate (Table 5 [1]):

  Commercial Aviation (per 100,000 flight hours): 0.022
  General Aviation (per 100,000 flight hours): 1.11
  Motor Vehicle: (per 100 million miles): 1.5

General Aviation (which Flytenow falls under) has a fatality rate 2 orders of magnitude greater than commercial airlines (Delta, Southwest, Skywest, etc)

1: http://enhs.umn.edu/current/injuryprevent/aviation/magnitude...

[ryan-c]

Comparing 100,000 flight hours to 100,000,000 miles seems strange to me. If you assumed an average speed of 50MPH, that would be:

    Commercial Aviation (per 100,000 flight hours): 0.022
    General Aviation (per 100,000 flight hours): 1.11
    Motor Vehicle: (per 100,000 driving hours): 0.075

This is data from 2000 though.

[asift]

What if I find 1.1 deaths per 100,000 flight hours to be a perfectly reasonable risk relative to the benefits I receive from using such a service? I can't make that decision for myself?

[lordnacho]

Are 100K flight hours comparable to 100M miles in a car?

[nostromo]

You're misreporting that data.

From the same table the overall risk of death (Fatality Rate) is the same for both forms of flying:

   Fatality Rate (Commercial Aviation): 1.9

   Fatality Rate (General Aviation): 1.91

The reason the "Fatal Accident Rate" is so different is because when a jetliner crashes, dozens or hundreds of people die. So a single accident is very deadly.

[jacquesm]

No, you're mis-interpreting the data. The commercial aviation record is as low as it is in spite of the large number of people on board. So the chances of accidents in general aviation are many times higher for any given flight using the one or the other mode.

In other words - and to make it really simple - if you are given the choice of going with a commercial carrier or with a general aviation craft to the same destination in a single flight then you would do wise to take the commercial carrier.

[nostromo]

You're correct in the narrow sense (a commercial flight is less likely to crash) but wrong on the big picture (a commercial flight is safer for passengers).

Here's the thing: we don't care about the number of crashed airplanes, we care about crashed people (the number of deaths). And the number of deaths is about the same per passenger mile flown.

Passengers are no safer in either form of flying, according to this source.

[nkurz]

It's worth getting to the bottom here, but like 'jacquesm' I think you are misinterpreting the data.

And the number of deaths is about the same per passenger mile flown.

Deaths per passenger mile is indeed the relevant metric, but this is not the number which is equal. Instead, the deaths per airplane mile are about equal. Since the commercial flights tend to have many more passengers, the passenger miles denominator will be greater by this ratio.

From a passenger's perspective, commercial flights are thus safer than private planes by this same ratio. I don't think the linked article gives enough information to calculate the ratio of passenger miles for GA and commercial, but 50x seems like it would be in the ballpark.

[apkostka]

Why would we care about the number of crashed people? You said it yourself, the number of deaths for commercial flight is higher because there are more people on board. If I'm on a plane, I don't care about how likely I am to be one of the people who died in airline crashes this year, I care about how likely it is that this plane is going to crash.

[nostromo]

I understand it's not intuitive, but the statistics are clear: If you have 100 times more people on commercial flights, then the flights would have to be 100 times less likely to crash to have the same risk to each passenger.

Let's break this into two specific questions (assuming the source is correct):

1) How likely is it that a specific flight will crash?

Answer: it's more likely that a private flight will crash than a commercial flight.

2) How likely is it that I will die on a private vs commercial flight?

Answer: your likelihood of dying is the roughly the same for both private and commercial flights.

[apkostka]

I'm not sure you're reading the replies here. Nobody is arguing that your likelihood of dying is significantly higher on a private flight. We're arguing that the thing you should care about is whether the specific flight that you are on will crash, which has a significantly higher likelihood in general aviation.