I hear it all of the time…including reading it just now on another thread: “Statistically, flying is the safest way to travel”…
But is it really? I know the stats, but it seems to me the question that is more appropriate is “If something should go wrong, are you safer in an airplane or somewhere else?”
Personally, I don’t buy it…flying is an extremely risky way to travel. If something does go wrong, you’re up the creek without a paddle. You’re 35,000 feet in the air, strapped into a chair inside of a metal tube. You have no control over your fate…it’s up to the pilot…or just luck. You live or die strapped in your seat.
At least if I am driving a car, I’m on the ground and I can do something about it. I can at least try to save myself.
You seem to think that if something goes wrong on an airplane, you’re very likely to die. Nope. Most plane crashes don’t end in fatality.
If you were in a car headed into a dangerous section of the road, who would you rather have behind the wheel–you, or Dale Earnhardt? If your mom has cancer, who do you want operating, you, or a guy who went to medical school?
I’ll go ya one further, most plane incidents don’t result in crashes.
You have professional pilots who go thru refresher training/recertification every 6-9 months. They go into the flight simulators & practice emergency conditions so if/when something happens they know what to do. When’s the last time you practiced an emergency in your car. You turn into a skid, but how far is just the right amount? What happens if one of your wheels comes off/tires blow out? etc.
Yes, safer in an airplane. You know the stats, as you just said.
You don’t buy that you already know the stats?
No it isn’t, you JUST SAID you knew all the stats.
Yet you know the stats. And all of those things could be said about a car (except for the 35,00ft thing (unless it is an extremely rare circumstance.)) You can’t control what other people or the weather or the road conditions are like.
Not if you are a passenger in the car. Just like on the plane.
I will grant you that some rando off the street that has been driving for years is probably safer driving a car than if he was piloting a plane. But when it comes to being passengers…you know the stats.
Which is safer, being on the Earth, or being on a NASA spacecraft? Well, if the Earth breaks, then you’re really screwed, but if a spacecraft breaks, you at least have a chance of fixing it.
Which of course means absolutely nothing, if you fail to consider that planets break only extremely rarely.
This indicates that you do not understand risk assessment. You are completely ignoring the probability of something going wrong in the first place. You are also confusing your personal ability to control a failure situation with the probability of a given outcome of all trials.
To simplify things, risk assessment calculates the probability of various outcomes, and the impact of those outcomes, and then weights those alternatives to come up with a bottom-line number for the expected value of the scenario. The expected value of a mile flown in a plane is extremely close to 100% survival. The expected value of a mile ridden in a car is still pretty good but not nearly as high.
Let me add that I would rather be in a plane with an engine blow up and Tammie Jo Shults as the pilot, than driving my own car when the engine blows up when I’m doing 75 on a busy interstate.
I hasten to add that not too many people drive their cars on cross-country trips compared to air travel. My hypothesis is that a long interstate drive may be safer than local trips because of fewer intersections and all traffic on divided highways moving the same direction. I have never seen that kind of a comparison to air travel.
I think I know where some of the misconception about the risk of flying comes from. Press coverage from airline deaths is simply tremendous while traffic deaths are mentioned locally, if at all. Take 2015, for example, national news would have been going ape three or four times a week at the rate of deaths in traffic accidents (~740 per week)) compared to the rate in airline fatalities (3.5 per week). The other consideration is that airline fatalities happen in bunches with up to hundreds at a time, when traffic fatalities are in small handfuls at most.
You say you have no control over your fate in an aeroplane and so you are less safe than if you were in a car. The pilot of the very same aeroplane you are in would say “I have control of my fate, therefore I am safer than if I was a passenger in a car with golffan.”
You are both using the same logic to come to a different conclusion, therefore the logic is bad.
I do think that it’s a bit disingenuous to compare generic air travel to generic driving. I have no idea what sort of pilot I’m getting, but when I’m driving, I know I’m not drunk, I am wearing my seatbelt, I’m in a fairly new/safe car, I’m conservative/defensive, I’m not driving a motorcycle . . .I feel like the fatalities/mile odds for me are a lot lower than for the whole nation averaged together. That’s the number that needs to be compared to the fatalities/mile in air travel.
Regardless of the reality of your own driving skill, your logic is not valid. You are assuming that most fatalities are the fault of the person who is killed or their equipment. Bad drivers kill good drivers and passengers every day.
And finally, commercial pilots have a lot more training and experience and more rigorous certification for what they do than you have had for driving. If the best qualification you have is that you are not drunk, I’m going with the pilot.
You should have an idea of what kind of pilot you are getting, since they are licensed and supervised a lot better than drivers. And there is a copilot also.
You might not be drunk, but that guy roaring the wrong way down the interstate is.
Is your car maintenance done to the level that airplane maintenance is done? Does your car have the redundancy of a plane? If one of your engines goes out in the middle of a freeway moving 70, you don’t have another to allow you to keep moving.
In words of one syllable, things are much less likely to go wrong, and there is often room to recover if they do. If a plane drops 1,000 feet, usually no trouble. If you are driving by a cliff and you drop 1,000 feet - crunch.
Airplanes are much safer per passenger-mile, but the stats change if measured per passenger-hour (though not nearly enough, I think, to make planes less safe). This does have a little relevance: Hours spent in travel is more relevant for certain purposes, both business and personal.
IIUC that favorable-for-aviation figure would be even more more favorable if expressed (as would seem more appropriate) in passenger-km rather than vehicle-km.
But what about non-commercial aviation — especially if measured in passenger-hours, not passenger-miles? Just off the top of my head, John Denver, Richie Valens, Buddy Holly, and John-John all died in plane crashes and I see here I’m missing several others: Otis Redding, Rickie Nelson, Rocky Marciano, Roberto Clemente, etc. How many celebrities died in car crashes?
