[cmeacham98]

The distance comparison does make sense, because the point of getting on a plane/car is to travel. People don't say "I'm going to drive for 30 mins", they say "I'm going to drive from Los Angeles to NYC". Comparing how dangerous that is on a plane requires comparing by distance, not time.

[anamexis]

I would guess the majority of time in general aviation is not for the purpose of travel. It's a hobby.

[cmeacham98]

If you're assuming it is a hobby then comparing it to car/motorcycle usage for travel is useless/invalid.

[anamexis]

Yes, exactly.

[hollerith]

A lot of it is to give pilots the experience they need to qualify to fly commercial airliners, also.

[bitdivision]

Agreed.. Though it's an often used metric: fatalities per billion kilometers (f/bnkm).

Someone told me that risk per unit distance was higher when walking than riding a motorcycle, which I thought sounded like it could be possible. Sadly it seems its not true [1].

Interesting how f/bnkm is so low for driving vs walking though.

[1]: https://www.normalizecycling.com/risk-in-cycling/units-of-ri...

[p1necone]

Eh, not really. Distance travelled !== quality of destination.

I can travel X minutes on a plane for Y cost to one set of destinations, or I can travel A minutes in a car for B cost to a different set of destinations. The actual distance between my current location and my destination means nothing to me, although the potential destinations do, which certainly are more varied with plane travel.

But I live in a pretty nice place, so travelling locally is pretty good too.

[cmeacham98]

We're comparing safety, not "quality of destination".

If you were to travel from point A to point B, and wanted to know whether driving or flying was safer, then the correct metric to look at is the "per distance" one.

[p1necone]

Yeah but most travel isn't to a fixed, "necessary" destination. About the only place like that for me is work, and I certainly can't fly there.

Or to put it another way - comparing two different modes of travel to one specific destination doesn't make much sense when the destination is partially fungible. I want to know what the safest way to get to (any sufficiently nice place) is, not to (one specific nice place).