“Doc, will I be able to play piano after the operation?”
One other possible difference in the comparisons: I think we’ve already established that flying with a professional commercial pilot is much safer than general aviation. But driving a car yourself is much more comparable to flying a general aviation plane yourself. If we’re going to be considering professional commercial pilots for the flying, maybe we should also consider professional commercial drivers for the driving. What’s safer, flying from LA to New York, or taking a Greyhound bus?
This article says that buses have a fatality rate of 0.11 per billion passenger-miles, which is higher than airlines (0.07 per billion passenger-miles). However, that includes all types of buses, and they don’t list a separate number for long-distance scheduled buses.
High-speed rail should be the safest of all - Japan’s Shinkansen has had zero passenger fatalities so far. But of course, there’s no number for high-speed rail in the article because there is no such thing in the US.
Commercial aviation includes small aircraft that are operated for hire.
If you are interested in only Part 135 operations (scheduled airlines) then it’s a different story.
Professional commercial pilots are part of general aviation. A commercial pilot license is the one above private pilot. (or it was when I got mine PP/SEL)
You’re referring to a pilot with an Airline Transport rating (the aviation Ph.D). Commercial pilots can and do regularly operate aircraft that are in the general aviation fleet for hire. (crop dusting, banner towing, short trips with paying passengers, flying cargo)
As far as I know, a private pilot, with the appropriate type rating, could buy and operate a Boeing 777, he just can’t charge passengers to ride in it, but he could haul his wife and kids to Honolulu if he pleased. Getting insurance for it would be a whole different issue though.
They can split the costs, though. It’s getting even easier with various websites that have popped up (along the lines of automobile ridesharing), though the FAA doesn’t seem to be happy about them. With enough people, the per-person cost would be… about what a normal plane ticket would cost.
The link contains data about commercial aviation, data quoted in the OP. The fact that the topic is about general is irrelevant.
Your question is flawed as it leaves too much open. Like the definition of commercial aviation. (which is far broader than you envision)
In 2008
The National Transportation Safety Board compiles aviation accident data. Preliminary statistics for 2008 show only 20 accidents for U.S. air carriers operating scheduled service. This works out to nearly zero accidents per million flying miles. No one died, and only five people were seriously injured.
I’m not searching but I’m willing to bet more than 1 person died in 2008 in a automobile accident.
http://traveltips.usatoday.com/air-travel-safer-car-travel-1581.html
also, from the same article…
*it calculated the odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident to be 1 in 98 for a lifetime.
For air and space transport (including air taxis and private flights), the odds were 1 in 7,178 for a lifetime*,
as you can see, even those stats include “private flights.”
The FAA has said they’re illegal, which prompted this thread.
Imagine a person who has a “frequent flyer miles” credit card and flies on commercial airlines every couple months. Let’s name this person Dave.
Now, suppose Dave reads a book or watches a documentary and decides, for whatever reason, to completely give up airplane travel for the rest of his life. Would Dave’s risk of dying go up or down as a result of this decision? I submit that, before you can answer this question, you must first consider this one: Would Dave continue traveling just as many thousands of miles as he did before?
I think it’s obvious that Dave would cut back on how many trips he took each year, and/or cut back on the average distance of each trip.
My point is that the availability of air travel enables us to take more and longer trips than we otherwise would. It’s totally unfair to compare 1,000 in a car with 1,000 miles on an airplane because people who only ride in cars will think long and hard about whether such a trip is necessary and they might decide not to go at all but people who fly will look at a 1,000 mile trip and shrug and say “hey that’s only a couple hours, no big deal” and they just go at the drop of a hat.
Let’s compare Dave’s risk of dying back when he used to fly on airplanes with his new risk of dying now that he has vowed never to fly again.
Old Dave used to fly six times per year, traveling a total of 24,000 miles (in addition to all the local driving he did, going back and forth to work and the grocery store, et cetera). New Dave still drives his car locally but now when he goes on a trip he takes his car cross country. But he doesn’t travel 24,000 miles anymore, he cuts back to fewer vacations and doesn’t go as far away from home as he used to, so he ends up driving 6,000 miles on the highway instead of flying 24,000 miles.
Those are the numbers we should be comparing. 24,000 miles on a jet vs. 6,000 miles on the interstate in a car. We need statistics about how dangerous it is to drive on the interstate, unskewed by the dangerous city driving back and forth to the grocery store and back and forth to work, because that’s irrelevant. Old Dave and New Dave do the exact same amount of shopping and commuting.
So, if you conclude that New Dave is more likely to die than Old Dave, then you could conclude “flying is safer than driving”.
There’s some merit to the argument that there’s more to it than just deaths per passenger-mile: by that metric, the Space Shuttle was a pretty safe way to travel, with only 0.37 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles.
But your New Dave vs. Old Dave isn’t fair, either. New Dave did less stuff than Old Dave. Would you claim that non-drivers are the safest drivers of all, because they don’t cause any deaths? Nonsense.
Any given individual needs to consider whether their travel–both in mode and quantity–exceeds their personal safety threshold. But when comparing populations, deaths per passenger-mile is the only metric that really makes sense.
Oh, now I see what you did. Problem is, they’re not interpreting the data correctly.
The link to the data doesn’t work anymore, but the web page is archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110622125248/http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Table6.htm
Why the article’s author arbitrarily chose 1991-2000, I don’t know. So I plugged ALL the data into a spreadsheet, going all the way to 2010. Total fatalities times 100 million, divided by total miles flown gives us 1.21 fatalities per 100 million miles flown, which is pretty close to what the article says, but I’m using better data.
The step they forgot was to then divide by the number of passengers on the plane, since clearly the NTSB is citing “miles flown”, not passenger miles. We don’t know that, so I’ll have to guess. I’m going to say 150. So 1.21 divided by 150 gives 0.008, which would be an individual’s chances of dying per 100 million miles flown.
I am reminded of this story:
A stats professor is found with a bomb in his carry-on-baggage. When asked why, he explains; “Statistics shows that the probability of a bomb being on an airplane is 1/1000, so the chance that there are two bombs is 1/1000000. If I already bring one, the chance of another bomb being around is actually 1/1000000, and I am much safer…”
There is also the other one about the nervous flyer who asks the flight attendant; “How often do these planes crash?” “Only once,” she replies.
Thank You
Assuming your analysis is correct, you win the thread. Finally, some straight dope on this! It’s a well established conclusion I have read in many places that flying the same distance is safer, yet the article was saying for every 100 million miles you fly, you have 1.57 people die, versus only 1.47 persons in car!
The 2011 thread did not have this analysis of yours!
Dividing by 150 makes it hugely safer. Even if the average airliner only carries 100 people it’s still 2 orders of magnitude safer. And another commentor here mentioned the injury rate - you’re not much more likely to be injured while flying than killed, while auto accidents injure and cripple people in vast numbers.
And to complicate the comparison, even further…
What about “Time” ?
Why deaths per mile, and not deaths per hour?
Summing up… who has more chances of getting killed (or becoming severely injured)?
A professional bus driver that drives from city A to city B,
or a commercial plane pilot that flies from city A to city B?
I mean, in the same period of time.
1 day, 1 year, or 30 years of work,
Deaths per hour is the wrong comparison, because a plane takes much less time to reach a destination than a car does, and people choose their trips by destination, not by travel time.
Likewise, the argument of “Well, if a guy were afraid of flying, he might take less trips overall” doesn’t work. If, for instance, he’s traveling so much because of his work, then not traveling as much means he loses his job and starves to death, so by that measure, flying is much safer than not flying.
That depends on what they do instead of driving. Let’s take a person named Maria. She reads a book about automobiles and decides, for whatever reason, that she will never travel by car again. Old Maria used to drive to work and drive to the grocery store. What does New Maria do? Does she take the bus? Does she ride her bike? Does she walk everywhere? Does she stay home and never leave her apartment?
Let’s suppose New Maria decides to ride her bicycle everywhere she used to driver her car. So, all those risks she used to be taking in her car and gone, dropped, zero. But she’s replaced them with new risks from increased bicycling. Has her life gotten any safer? In order to answer that, we’d have to know the risk of injury/death from riding your bicycle to the grocery store vs. taking a car to the grocery store.
But that comparison would only be fair if she changed absolutely nothing else about her life. We’d be assuming that she made the same number of trips to the grocery store each month, assuming she kept going to the same grocery store, assuming she kept working at the same job the same number of days per week, assuming she stayed in the same apartment the same number of miles away, etc. In real life, a person who vowed to never drive again would probably make adjustments, like start shopping at a grocery store which is closer to her apartment.
The same goes for Dave, who suddenly decides to give up flying. What’s he going to replace it with? Is he going to continue traveling the same number of miles as before but now he’ll do it by car instead of airplane? Or will he cut back on how many trips he makes?
If you insist on comparing deaths per million passenger miles of cars vs. airplanes, you are assuming that New Dave will drive the same number of miles that Old Dave used to fly. I say that assumption is wrong. It’s just as wrong as assuming that New Maria would stay home and never leave her apartment after deciding to stop traveling by car.
For some reason I think the statistics need to be controlled so as to eliminate short car trips like to work and to the supermarket. There are no equivalent airplane flights, so that will skew the statistics making cars seem more dangerous.
I think the question that needs answered would be: If I want to get from New York to Los Angeles, would I statistically be safer by flying or driving? My daily commute doesn’t seem to be relevant to that.
And if there were no airplanes, travel over big water would be by ship and so more people would die of old age while traveling so … What???
And by little boats going over big water… OK, OK, I’ll quit. 