You're right on the basic idea here, but may be wrong on the specific claim. Basically, trains and buses are also very safe, possibly even safer.
In the US (important qualifier), commercial air travel sees a fatality rate of 0.07 per billion passenger miles. Also (important qualifier), that number excludes acts of suicide and terrorism.
Buses see a fatality rate of 0.11 per billion passenger miles. Trains see a rate of 0.15 per billion passenger miles (not including fatalities of non-passengers).
Both of those modes of transportation compare favorably with air travel. If you consider a worldwide perspective (in which pilots are on average less well trained), and include the effects of hijacked planes, it's possible one of the two might even beat it.
(I'm not disagreeing with you that on a per-mile basis, air travel is very safe. I just think the specific numbers here are interesting. Also worth pointing out that for trips less than a few hundred miles, other modes are probably safer. If rail was used more for long distance travel, it would probably improve its safety record by this metric. And air travel is pretty terrible for the environment as well.)
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.
According to this chart https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... buses and trains have 0.02 to 0.04 deaths per 100,000,000 miles travelled. This compares to 0.01 deaths in the commercial aviation. So pretty much on par, but if you switched to deaths per hours of travel, which is IMHO better statistic, assuming that a average plane flights say 10 times faster than a bus/train (800km/h vs 80km/h which seems reasonable) then the commercial aviation is actually less safe, but not by a big margin either, within the same order of magnitude.
Let's not exaggerate. Per mile, airliners are roughly 10x (one order of magnitude) safer than cars. It is generally true that driving to/from the airport is the most dangerous part of an airline trip, but not by a particularly large factor.
I also think comparing air travel to car travel is a bit unfair -- it's better to compare air travel to Bus travel (the driver has a CDL) or Train travel (The engineer is specially trained)
Car fatalities likely dwarf bus and train fatalities too. It's not that airplanes are particularly safe, it's that cars are particularly unsafe.
Airplanes are faster than cars, and the average trip is longer. So, even if the pax fatality rate per distance is much better for aircraft (a factor of 200 to 1000, say), the fatality rate per trip is not that much better (a factor of 2 to 10, say).
Some more notes:
- That is for part 121 aviation (airlines). General aviation fatality rates are much worse (you're 15 times more likely to die in a small plane than in a car for the same distance, and 250 times more per trip...)
- An airliner also carries many more pax. The above numbers are per pax; if you base it per vehicle, then a plane is only about 5 times safer than a car for a given distance, and about 20 times more likely to crash than a car per trip.
- About 4% or so of all B747 or A300 ever built have been complete hull losses. (Newer planes are safer, presumably, but also haven't been around that long, so the statistics are not entirely trivial to compare.)
I'm not sure where you get that from, I gave you links so [citation please]
Deaths per billion journeys:
Bus: 4.3
Rail: 20
Car: 40
Plane: 117
Every time I get on a plane I have less chance of making it than on other modes of transport, even cars. Rail and bus are much safer per trip, amount of time spent, and are in the same ballpark as flight when using the per distance travelled metric.
Not really. If my memory serves me right, Planes are much safer than cars in terms of fatalities per km, safer than car per hour, and on par with cars in terms of fatal accident per flight. Planes flights are faster and longer than car trips.
It seems, if the risk is based on the distance, then air is 60x safer. But, for per journeys, air travel is worse. For per hours, the air travel is only 3x safer.
The popularized concept of air travel's risk gave me the impression that air travel was sooo much safer than car. smh. If you asked me a month ago, I would say air travel should be, at least, 1000x safer than car.
Cars definitely. Busses probably. But airplanes are ludicrously safe. Between 2000 and 2010 there was 1 fatality per 5 billion miles. To put that another way you could fly continuously for 1000 years before you would be expected to die.
Indeed I looked into it a little bit more and found that planes are about three orders or magnitude safer than cars [1] (fatality per miles traveled). So even assuming that the MAX is two orders of magnitude less safe than the 737 NG (based on limited data), it would still be an order of magnitude safer than traveling by car.
[1] I found 11 fatalities per trillion miles for planes, and 12.5 fatalities per billion miles for cars (in the US).
You may also want to compare that to the probability of road accident. I don't remember where and when I've read it (and haven't validated the sources) but IIRC, cars have significantly worse number of fatalities per kilometer than planes.
Being better then driving shouldn't be the standart. Specially driving in the US.
Flying isn't safer then trains I would assume.
Flying has the advantage of being seperated from almost everything else. Most accidents happen when there is mixed traffic, specially cars operated by people with minimal training.
Edit: corrected numbers.
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