[sliken]

See wikipedia's "aviation_safety" page. Avaiation is clearly safer per mile (a factor of 60 or so), but not that much safer per hour (factor of 4 per so), but is 3 times more dangerous per journey.

So driving to the airport might well be safer than flying across the country according to the journey metric. Even using the hour metric I often am less than an hour from the airport and take more than a 4 hour flight.