1 in 114 chance of dying in a car crash vs 1 in 9281 chance of dying in a plane crash. You can verify this anecdotally...we all know someone who has died in a car crash (I know at least 6 close friends and relatives who have), but nearly no one knows someone who died in a civilian plane crash.
But his fear is irrational so I don't know if statistics will help. Most people are afraid of sharks, lightning strikes, and snake bites even those these events are extremely rare, and nearly no one fears heart disease or cancer which are the top two causes of death by a factor of tens of thousands. 600k people will die of cancer this year vs maybe 500 plane deaths.
Plenty of people survive plane accidents; in fact if you are involved in a plane accident in the US you have a greater than 90% chance of surviving.
Which highlights the point; it is fear that drives your viewpoint (that car accidents are preferable plane crashes) rather than statistics :)
EDIT: I don't have my copy of Risk to hand, but from memory the numbers work out something like.. probability of being in an air crash and it killing you is 1 in several million. Probability of being in a car crash and it killing you is 1 in several thousand (or ten thousands, can't remember). Either way - an order of magnitude more risky :)
planes are the safest way to travel PERIOD. What other method of travel gets as much safety testing? And has a second pilot just in case the first one is knocked out.
From 1999 to 2007 there's been a total of 11,000 deaths from plane crashes world wide. With an average of 1,200 deaths per year.
Car accidents? According to world health organization, there are a total of 1.2 million deaths world wide per YEAR. In addition to 48 million injuries per year.
So in 2007 when there were 965 deaths from plane crashes, you were 1,243 times more likely to die in a car accident than you were in a plane crash.
The statistics I reference are not likelihood of accidents but likelihood of death. You are tens of thousands of times more likely to die when you get in a car versus a plane.
Did you get injured or die? 30,000 people die of car crashes every year, about half resulting from a much more common and legal drug.
How many people die of assaults on public transit every year? I’ll let you look that one up.
Fear isn’t the same as risk. Lots of people are afraid of planes. Not a single passenger died of as a result of a commercial airline incident last year in the United States.
The probability of dying in an air crash is in the order of 10 million to one.
Being killed by lightning is about 1 million to one, being killed in a car crash is about 20000 to one.
So if you spend time thinking about which seat you're going to sit in when you fly to minimize your risk of dying, you are completely wasting your time.
The other thing is that airplane crashes are very often
catastrophic. A whole lot more people survive car
accidents than die in them.
I'm speechless. You think that's something positive? Another way to phrase the same thing: not only cars kill a lot more people than planes, they also multilate and injure even more. Only 4 people died last year in air accident in US (http://www.planecrashinfo.com/2007/2007.htm), which makes it 10,000 more likely to die in a car accident.
You're right in your other point - it seems people don't mind dying so long as they have illusion they could have prevented it. Only when people feel powerless they become afraid.
What are people more afraid of? Planes. Why? There's a few theories, but one is people are afraid of dying due to somebody else's mistake, the same with surgery: powerless. Even in a car accident, there's a bit of victim-blaming: the insurance company always says a person could have been more wary.
A cloud failure is much, much more rare, but more scary because we're not accountable. When it happens, we're "more helpless."
*Estimated from a drop from 2009. Can't find the actual number.
Cars & trucks 5.75 deaths per billion miles
Commercial airlines 0.06 deaths per billion miles
So airlines are a couple orders of magnitude safer by miles traveled.
In my own personal case I put about 10,000 miles on my car each year, and I travel about 50,000 - 80,000 miles on an airplane. So airlines are still safer as I don't travel 2 orders of magnitude farther on them.
> there are a significant chance of surviving a car accident, but almost none at all of a plane one.
Also, the charts of fatalities by travel mode that I've seen have already screened out the non-fatalities. If you died in a car accident, no matter how un/likely it was, you're 100% dead.
Interesting, but simple to explain because people tend to operate on unthinkability rather than hazard.
While the odds of dying in a car accident are (much) higher than dying in a plane accident, it's unthinkable that so many people die simultaneously from a method of transportation that intuitively feels less safe than a box rolling on the ground.
The only exception on that chart is the asteroid impact, which can probably be discounted because it's for all intents and purposes impossible in our lifetime.
I think the OP has a fear of flying and hasn't read the statistic that he was far more likely to die on his way to the airport instead of using the safest form of travel.
Statistically, you’re more likely to choke and asphyxiate on your dinner than to die in a plane crash.
That doesn’t make a defective flight system a greater or lesser problem. It’s irrelevant.
Aggregate data is tough to interpret anyway for a cross country trip. Traffic deaths per 100M miles vary from 1.83 (South Carolina) to 0.54 (Massachusetts). Also, motor vehicle aggregate numbers include all trips — if you compare common carriers, busses and rail are dramatically safer than private cars.
1 in 114 chance of dying in a car crash vs 1 in 9281 chance of dying in a plane crash. You can verify this anecdotally...we all know someone who has died in a car crash (I know at least 6 close friends and relatives who have), but nearly no one knows someone who died in a civilian plane crash.
But his fear is irrational so I don't know if statistics will help. Most people are afraid of sharks, lightning strikes, and snake bites even those these events are extremely rare, and nearly no one fears heart disease or cancer which are the top two causes of death by a factor of tens of thousands. 600k people will die of cancer this year vs maybe 500 plane deaths.
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