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by nkurz 2782 days ago
For those questioning these numbers, 10x might be a little high, but I think it's at least in the right direction. Consider how many car trips the average person takes per year, versus the number of times they travel by plane. Travel by commercial airline is 100's of times safer per mile than travel by private vehicle, but the average plane trip is well over 100 times the distance of the average car trip.

Here are Wikipedia's numbers for a 1990-2000 in the UK (because that's what they happen to have easily available):

  Deaths per Billion  
      Journeys Hours Kilometers
  Car:    40    130    3.10
  Air:   117     30     .05
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comp...

So for an average journey by each a couple decades ago, this says that travelling (a long journey) by plane is about 3x the risk of death as travelling (a short journey) by car. Does anyone have more recent numbers for the world as a whole?
1 comments
FabHK 2781 days ago
Come to think of it, I probably misspoke, because I was looking at fatalities per vehicle journey instead of per passenger journey (and a plane carries more pax than a car).

Best as I can estimate now, the risk of dying on your next (scheduled air carrier, part 121) plane journey is maybe a third as on your next car journey (in the US, thanks to the amazing safety record there).

The aviation industry likes to quote fatalities per passenger mile, which is very favourable to air travel, and of course also relevant if you decide which mode of transport to take for a given journey from A to B.

However, if we want to look at how twitchy you feel for taking a typical car journey vs a typical plane journey, we need to look at fatalities per passenger journey, and they bring the numbers closer together by a factor of around 100.

Numbers for general aviation are much worse: you're about 200 times as likely to die on the next GA trip than car trip.

There are just many more cars around than planes. Also, note that 2% of all B737, 4% of all B747, and 5% of all A300 ever built have been hull losses (including non-fatal incidents). But yeah, aviation has gotten amazingly safe in the last decades.

Would be interesting to look at corresponding numbers for Europe or the world.

See the Uber Elevate report, page 17, for some numbers.

https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf

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