[foobar_fighter]

On the other hand, food poisoning kills many more people than plane accidents. Despite that, I have heard a lot more from the media about fatalities from plane accidents than from food poisoning. And I suppose that's simply because fear sells.

[marcosdumay]

In proportion to the exposition, badly stored eggs kill way less than the overall history of the Boeing 737-800Max. Cars also kill proportionally less. Last time I looked at the numbers, riding a motorcycle on the city killed more. by a small margin.

Of course, that is extrapolating from the small number of flights and deaths that occurred. I don't think the sample is statistically significant enough to compare with cars... but the eggs are on a quite safe territory.

[rossdavidh]

If you get food poisoning, your chance of living is still pretty good. If your plane crashes, you might live, but your odds are much worse than if you get food poisoning.

Many more people eat meals each day, than fly in a plane.

[rootusrootus]

Your odds of surviving a plane crash are also quite good, though I agree it's much more likely to kill you than food poisioning.

[BigJono]

Are they? I'd be interested to see some stats.

What kind of plane crashes are there where you have a good chance of surviving? I'd have guessed the only ones where everyone survives are where they run off the runway at half speed and bump around a bit on an empty field of grass.

Surely if something happens in mid air and you're not able to make it back to a runway and actually land the plane your odds would be complete shite (<5%?)

[foldr]

Some old but still relevant stats: https://flightsafety.org/fsd/fsd_oct01.pdf

"From 1983 through 2000, NTSB investigated 26 accidents involving fire, serious injury and either substantial aircraft damage or aircraft destruction. There were 2,739 occupants involved in these serious accidents; 1,524 (55.6 percent) of the occupants survived the accident, 716 (26.1 percent) of the occupants died from impact, 340 (12.4 percent) died from unknown causes, 12 131 (4.8 percent) died from fire/smoke, and 28 (1.0 percent) died from other causes."

[ipython]

Not if the plane crash is caused by runaway uncontrollable maximum deflection of the elevator trim as in the case of these MAX crashes.

[lagadu]

Well it depends on the type of crash really. Landing gear failure has a fairly high survival rate for example, on the other hand MCAS-related crashes are pretty damn lethal compared to everything else.

[tim333]

Food poisoning is not very exciting. Anything involving large things falling from the sky and blowing up will get hugely more media coverage for the same number of deaths.