The biggest issue is that the stats are skewed by commercial aviation. When you remove that, it's relatively risky per passenger-mile.
Small planes are certainly not safer than driving. I'm a private pilot and i've studied it at length (and I love flying).
I don't have time to braindump my research, as it's slightly hard to compare fatalities per passenger mile in autos vs per flight hour with light non-commercial aviation. It's about 100,000 hours per 1.9 fatalities which includes commercial travel. It's SIGNIFICANTLY higher in small planes.
The way I summarize it to people in casual conversation is: Flying a Cessna is safer than riding a motorcycle but more dangerous than driving a car.
I've tried to do this myself, and found it's pretty difficult task. When you remove really stupid mistakes pilots make (and we'd never do any of those things... we're not THOSE pilots... right?!) it starts to look a lot safer.
Yes, but given the distances involved in aviation, mid-airs are less likely than traffic collisions.
It is comforting to know that if you are religious about your preflight checks and your planning, and never fly in weather you aren't comfortable with, your odds of survival are greatly increased. How much is hard to tell, but making a hobby of reading NTSB reports shows you that the unavoidables - like wings randomly falling off - are pretty rare. Stupidity rules the day in aviation accidents.
"How dangerous is flying? There are 16 fatal accidents per million hours of general aviation. It is fairly safe to assume that when a plane crashes and someone dies, everyone on board dies. By contrast, the death rate for automobile driving is roughly 1.7 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles. Car crashes don't always kill everyone in the car so let's use this statistic as provided, which is for an individual traveling in a car rather than for the entire car. So considering that the average airplane accomplishes a groundspeed of at least 100 miles per hour, those million hours of flight push the occupants of the plane over more than 100 million miles of terrain. Comparing 16 fatal accidents to the 1.7 rate for driving, we find that flying is no more than 10 times as dangerous per mile of travel. And since most accidents happen on takeoff or landing, a modern fast light airplane traveling a longish distance might be comparable in safety to a car.
My father has his pilots' license and took me on many long-distance trips when I was young. I've toyed with the idea of going to get my license but when I talked to him about it, he tried to talk me out of it. Small planes are dangerous, he says, not because the planes themselves are inherently dangerous, but because the pilots flying them are typically inexperienced and don't have enough hours behind the stick to instinctively deal with emergencies when they happen. I'm pretty sure that your statistics would be lop-sided if you broke down the number of accidents into quantiles by the pilot's flying hours.
As a private pilot, small a/c flying is as safe as you make it. As much as pilots understand the concepts, they tend to fall back to baser instincts when an engine goes bad at the worst time.
Right, this is where the experience comes in I imagine, and the requirement for X amount of flight hours for Y job. It's not about how easy it is to fly in nominal conditions, but rather how those one in a thousand or million events get handled, in between the hours of "tedium".
My father was a flight instructor for the Air Force in the 1950s. He said the most common causes of accidents were running out of fuel, flying into bad weather, and failing to warm up the engine before takeoff.
> As the single-engine Marchetti climbed during takeoff, the engine suddenly quit.
That's the symptom of failing to warm up the engine properly - it quits just after leaving the ground.
Had fuel, wrong tank. Not enough altitude to try to make it back to a runway. One reason why I appreciate my glider rating - we always know where/when we're going if our engine (tow plane or winch) stops.
Or those who are flying in poor weather ('marginal VFR').
So many accidents read as the pilot really shouldn't have, but did anyway.
These can be greatly mitigated by ensuring that pilots stay current, for instance the clubs I belong to demand 6 monthly re-testing, rather than 2 years the license demands. Not to mention, if you don't fly for 4 weeks, you have to pass a mini re-test. In my clubs long history they have never lost a club plane or pilot.