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by anamexis 1224 days ago
Is it?

In US General Aviation, there were 332 deaths in 19,454,467 flight hours in the year 2020.

https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20211117.as...

2 comments

Assuming all hours were flown at Cessna 172 cruise speed of 140mph, that gives about 2e7 * 140 = 2.8e9, divided by 332 gives about 8.4 million miles per fatality.

Compared to 85 million miles travelled per fatality on the roads in general, and about 4 million miles travelled per fatality on motorcycles.

2X better than motorcycles, 10X worse than road fatalities in general.

And that's being quite generous about the mileage.

I don't think miles travelled per fatality is a useful point of comparison for general aviation. This puts it about on par with pedestrian deaths per mile travelled, and I don't think most people would call walking "extremely dangerous."
>Is it?

Yes, it is.

Very similar to how dangerous motorcycle riding is. Work out approx. hours of operation from miles driven (say avg. 30-50mph) and from there use annual fatalities. [1] Given that, death-per-hour for 332 deaths/19M in flight hours is roughly comparable to the 6000 deaths seen in motorcycle accidents. Much higher than automobiles, much higher than commercial flight.

[1] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...

Ok, so per hour it is comparable to motorcycles. But consider also that the average private pilot only flies 100-150 hours per year.

I don't disagree that it is more dangerous than automobiles or commercial flight. But I wouldn't characterize it as "extremely dangerous." Nor would I characterize motorcycles as such.

I guess we disagree on motorcycle danger then. I consider motorcycles to be extremely dangerous (mostly to their drivers). A friend of mine died about 1.5 years ago on one. I'd had two other people (not as close) in my life die in motorcycle accidents so I used to cringe inside every time he told me he was going riding over the weekend, though I would just wish him well & to be safe. Riding made him happy, was a stress reliever for him. And as far as that goes there are probably worse habits like smoking & drinking to excess, but that doesn't make any of them non-dangerous.
Google says "motorcycles are usually ridden for around 3,000 miles per year on average" so that's less than a hundred hours. Another result says the median is 1000 and 90th percentile is around 5000.

Neither one is "extremely" dangerous but it's a far cry from "all these strict regulations make it extremely safe" like with commercial flight.