I shouldn’t have eaten all the neutronium…
from http://hazmat.dot.gov/riskmgmt/riskcompare.htm
Motor Vehicle: 1.3 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles.
Railroad: 1.3 deaths per million vehicle miles.
Motorcycle: 31.3 deaths per 100 million miles.
Aircrafts: 1.9 deaths per 100 million aircraft miles.
Assuming there are no typos in the original source…
I have to wonder about railroad and aircraft. Are we to assume that there are ~100 passengers per vehicle mile? If so, railroad is as safe as motor vehicle, and air travel is ~ 68x safer. And motorcycles? Damn. Just damn, that’s a startling number.
Thankfully they will probably not stop making airplanes and motorcycles just because of the fears of a few timid souls.
Just think of how safe driving would be if they trained and tested as strictly as they do for a pilots license. And forced the maintenance to be on par also.
I don’t have a cite for it other than the “Gee Whiz!” info box in my psychology 101 textbook, but according to that, after 9/11 lots of folks stopped flying on airplanes and took road trips instead. In the 3 months after 9/11, there was something like 350 additional deaths in car accidents then there had been in the same 3 month period in previous years. The end result was that apparently more people died in car accidents while avoiding flying on planes than had actually died in the series of plane crashes that lead to them avoiding flying in the first place.
To fly an airliner, a pilot has to have hundreds of flying hours, all sorts of training certifications, and oftentimes is coming out of the military aviation community, and has all the (very strict and in-depth) aviation training that military pilots get.
In order to be allowed to drive a car (with passengers, even!), I took driving lessons for 3 months from a legally blind driver’s ed instructor that involved about 20 minutes of driving a week, and then took a 10-question multiple choice test.
Now, do you REALLY feel safer on the road with me than you do in the air with one of them professional pilots? 
JustAnotherGeek writes (quoting from a webpage):
> Aircrafts: 1.9 deaths per 100 million aircraft miles.
Note that on that webpage it says this is is the average for the five years 1999 to 2003. The webpage says that there has been an average of 138 aircraft deaths per year, so apparently this means that there was a total of 690 (plus or minus 2) deaths over those five years. It says in the notes to the table that this includes the 265 people on September 11th who were on one of the four planes. So if we didn’t include them, there would only be 425 people killed in aircraft accidents over those five years, for a yearly average of 85 aircraft deaths. This would make it 1.1 deaths per 100 million aircraft miles. Suppose we slid the five-year window forward to start just after the accident in October 2001 on the New York/Santo Domingo flight and to end five years later. There was only one scheduled aircraft crash with any deaths during those five years. I don’t know about general aviation. I suspect that the total would make the average noticeably less and hence make the deaths per miles even less than the 1.1 deaths per 100 million aircraft miles for 1999 to 2003 (not including September 11th). There are so few aircraft deaths that even a five-year average will be variable because most of the deaths will be in a few big accidents.
[nitpick] Actually, a professional pilot needs thousands of hours of experience to get an airline job. And nowadays, most professional pilots do not have military service in their background - the military isn’t training the numbers of people required so most new airline pilots come up through the civilian ranks. [/nitpick]
Just as not all air travel is equally safe, not all car travel is equally safe. Obviously if your car is well maintained; if you drive awake and sober; if you don’t run red lights; if you don’t drive as if you are in a race; if you swallow your pride and drive defensively; if you wear your seatbelt; etc. your odds of dying in a crash are lot lower than otherwise. How much lower is hard to say but it wouldn’t shock me if the odds were comparable to those of commercial plane travel.
To find out how safe it is for you, you need to figure out what class you are in. For example, airline travel might be safer for a 19 year old male, but it might be more dangerous to fly versus driving if you are a 38 year old woman with 20+ years of driving experience.
It reminds me of comparisons to getting hit by lightning. Well, the odds might be ten skazillion to one of getting hit by lightning, but if you are in a lightning storm with a 3 iron on a par 5, the odds have changed greatly!
So, if you are 18 years old and driving around at 11pm on a Saturdahy night, you’d be safer on a flight from Pittsburgh to Dallas.
These comparison figures throw me for a loop. Should the comparisons be made basd on hours-driving vs hours-flying, and not mileage based?
As others have noted, almost all of the musicians who have died in plane crashes were on small crafts, piloted sometimes by inexperinced pilots (in John Denver’s case, himself), and often times in bad weather. I can’t recall any, with the exception of Kyu Sakamoto, who have died in commercial airline accidents. Obviously, your chances of dying when being piloted by an inexpereinced pilot do go up, same as by driving with an inexperienced driver.
True, but of course not all 18 year old men are the same. Many are excellent drivers.
The bottom line is that the risk from driving is highly individualized.
Agreed. However, it is much safer to drive a car down a busy highway than it is to drive a plane down a busy highway.
Nonsense. I bet if I started trundling down I-35 in a 767, people would yield to my right of way pretty damn fast. 
Another nitpick - although the airplane was new to John Denver he was by no means an “inexperienced” pilot. He’d been license to fly since his teens and has owned and flown airplanes for many years before his fatal accident.
He was inexperienced in that particular type of aircraft, which was a definite contributor to the accident, but the fact is that he has the experience and skills to have been a commercial/professional pilot, had he chosen that route instead of being an entertainer. [/nitpick]
Broom
John Denver proved the old pilots saying “The only time you have too much fuel is when you are on fire”
IIRC he had problems trying to change fuel tanks due to the strange placement of the valve.
[Gratuitous bad JD joke]
Q. What was John Denver’s last hit?
A. The Pacfic Ocean
[/GBJDJ]
I wouldn’t know. I always jumped out of the darn things before they landed!
82nd ABN DIV
True. And experimental homebuilts are infamous for “strange placement” of various knobs and levers. Not to mention that airplanes in that weight range are also sensitive to the shifting weight of the occupants. Someone with more experience in them would be much more likely to either work out the switching thoroughly on the ground before attempting it in the air, try it for the first time at a greater altitude, and/or be much more cautious how they moved in the cockpit. Or, after the first step, decide to move the switch back to where the designer originally intended it to be.
It may be that his experience with more conventional airplanes reduced the caution with which he approached the machine - I’ve seen that before with high-time pilots with extensive ratings “stepping-down” to lightplanes and ultralights.
Are airplanes safer than cars? Well, that’s what Superman told me. And he’s never lied to me before.