[kilburn]

> You get it man. I've always found that statistical comparison with car accidents very lame and misguided. The sheer feeling of helplessness when you are in a plane, and think something is seriously wrong.

No, you both don't get it. It's not debatable.

Lets start with the numbers in [1]. There is says that ~25% of the plane crashes are fatal. Also, since 1997 there's been no more than "1 [death] for every 2,000,000,000 person-miles". So let's (incorrectly) assume that all accidents were fatal, so the rate would be no more than 4 deaths for every 2billion miles/person, or 2 deaths per 1billion miles/person.

Now we look at [2] for car fatalities. Let's use the USA numbers: 8.5 deaths per 1 billion vehicle kms. This works out to 5.2 deaths per billion vehicle kms. A quick google search indicates that the average vehicle occupancy in the US is ~1.6 [3]. This turns our figure to 3.25 deaths per billion miles/person.

That is, even if we assume that all airplane accidents are fatal and we only count casualties from road accidents (completely disregarding the much higher number of injuries), it is roughly 50% riskier to use a car than a plane.

What do you find misguiding here?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...

[3] http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2010_fotw...

[yeukhon]

You are not getting the actual point.

The point is not the number of death or likelihood of getting into an accident. We are not comparing the 300k airplanes (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/584144.html) with "254,212,610 registered passenger vehicles" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unite...) in the U.S. back in 2009. And yes, I know airplane now is equipped with auto-pilot which increases the safety of flying.

What we have been arguing is the likelihood to survive when an accident has occurred.

Compare the followings:

1. Heart attack during flying vs during walking/on a bus/on a train

2. Airplane crashes into ocean vs drunk drive crashed into another car on highway

3. Gunman hijack airplane vs gunman hijack a Starbuck

In every case, ground accidents are more likely to receive assistance than flying accidents, logically.

If we equip vehicles with auto-pilot system, will that make driving safer?

Living in the space is quite safe as long as nothing goes wrong. But in a zero-gravity environment, middle of nowhere, far away from Earth, living in the space is still more dangerous than living next to the most active volcano today. Why? Because you could relocate (if it's a sudden eruption, fine...). Yet given enough time and with a warning, one could escape from the island on their own or with helps before the eruption.

[kilburn]

In my previous post's numbers, I counted all airplane accidents as fatal. That is, I set the likelihood of surviving a plane accident to 0. I only used the death numbers from car accidents though, so the likelihood of dying in a car accident is the actual likelihood as observed in the past.

The number of cars and number of planes does not matter in the above calculation, because the numbers are normalized to miles/person. More planes in the air is not likely to increase those normalized numbers by any significant measure.

Now, (1) is a fair point and I must concede on that. (2) is already accounted within the numbers above. (3)'s casualties are also counted in the plane case, but not in the Starbucks case, so this actually detracts from your point.

Auto-piloted vehicles would be a huge safety measure in a not-so-distant future. However, there are lots of ethical/political issues that we need to overcome to require people to use their autopilots (e.g. who is liable when the autopilot screws up?)

The living-in-space comparison is way out of line. On the one hand, you don't fly to work: you fly occasionally when you need to do long distance travels. If you foresee any problems (you are sick, have heart problems, whatever) you just don't fly. On the other hand, your safest bet would be to not travel at all, yet you take the risk because you gain something from it. Now, if you decide that you do want to travel from the west to the east coast, the risk is simply lower if you do it by plane than by car. At least that's what the numbers say...

[balladeer]

You are keeping on arguing and deviating. That guy just wanted to compare the feelings in two situations:

- Car is running at 80kmph on empty road and the engine stops working - the drivers waits for it to slow down and parks on the side somewhere and calls 911 (or some other number)

- Plane is flying at 10K feet level and engines stop working. Pilot takes his son's photo from his front pocket and has a close (probably last) look and then maybe starts praying if he is a believer.

Numbers, numbers, facts, facts. If these were to tell us how we should feel in a certain scenario there wouldn't be any branch of philosophy, psychology and all those shit.

It's a simple what-if: What if a plain stops working at high altitude and what if a car stops working at high speed. In case of a plane you brake, turn, up, down, stop - you are done.