Dying in a fiery plane crash or winning the lottery?
What I want to know is, are there more $1 million plus lottery winners in the United States each year or plane crash victims? (Doesn’t actually have to be fire involved to qualify)
Let’s exclude lottery winners in other countries, but any flight originating or terminating in the USA is fair game, even if the crash occurs in say, Nova Scotia.
I’m not a mathematician, but – don’t you need to know number of flights (or air miles, or passengers) total, and number of lottery tickets sold, total, for the numbers to be meaningful?
The ultimate bummer would be dying in a fiery plane crash with the winning powerball ticket in your pocket, of course.
Nah, that’s too complicated. Because of course not everybody buys lottery tickets, and those that do buy in different quantities. Ditto air travel: not everybody flies, and some people fly once a year - others fly once a a week. So for an individual you could work it out, but it’s just complicated. Although if someone wants to work that out, fine by me.
Just want to know straight up number of million plus winners versus air fatalities.
Can’t change the rules now, the thread is titled which is more likely, not which are there more of.
Maybe we could rephrase the question. Given one flight, what are your odds of a fiery crash (or maybe just a crash-related fatality)? Given one lottery ticket (say MegaMillions), what are your odds of hitting all numbers (without worrying about the prize amount or splitting the pot)?
Each individual can then put in their own numbers for how many flights they take and/or tickets they buy.
No, you’re changin my OP. To quote:
Of all the lotteries available, the worst odds are for Powerball/Megamillions. The best odds are probably for individual, state run lotteries with the initial prize in the $1-3 million range.
Of flights, your odds of a crash undoubtedly are higher on some modes of transportation, and lower on others. For example, I don’t think there’s EVER been a crash of a Boeing 767 or 777. Single engine Cessnas seem to drop out of the sky a lot more frequently.
So the reason I asked the way I did was to make it a simple exercise.
This is the Dope – there are no simple exercises.
Are you talking about just commercial airliners or all planes? There hasn’t been a crash of a major airliner since that plane crashed into a New York neighborhood right after 9/11. There is an example of good news that doesn’t get reported much.
Most airliner crashes don’t kill everybody even when they do happen. Commuter airline flights crash more often but they hold fewer people.
I don’t think you need to do complicated math for the straightforward version of the question. There are way more 1 million plus lottery winners than people that killed in airliner crashes in the U.S.
I doubt anyone has a definitive answer available to toss out.
Suggestion: Compile the data, calculate the odds, win fame & fortune?
Pilot type here …
cite: http://ntsb.gov/aviation/Table1.htm
In 2004 (latest data available), the NTSB says the big jet airlines killed 14 people, the commuter/express airlines killed 64, and general aviation (lightplanes to corporate jets) killed 556. Foreign aircraft & ultralights killed off another 2+14 = 16 total. Grand total = 650
Of those, all but one were on the plane. One lucky soul was standing on the ground when a plane hit them. Oops.
That was out of at least 11.3 million flights (general aviation doesn’t have to report their flight count, but I bet it’s between 1 & 2 million more flights.)
In general, 2004 was a safe year for the big jets and a typical year for everybody else. A more typical big jet year kills ~150, not 14.
So that’s airplanes.
As to lotteries, Powerball sez: (http://www.powerball.com/pb_news.asp) they’ve had 20 winners at/over $1Mill since 1/1/2005. That annualizes out to 22 expected for all of 2005.
The newer format Powerball introduced mid-year makes more $1M winners, so the annual total going forward will probably be larger than 25, while the total from 2004 (same year as the airplane stats) was only 12.
Now Powerball is not the only lottery in the USA, so you’ll have to add those others. Other than the NY lottery, most of those are small fry & don’t produce many $1M jackpot winners.
I think the US-based lotteries other than Powerball almost certainly don’t create the 50+ total $1M winners a year needed to pass the airline’s kill count. So overall, I’d bet there were more airline fatalities than $1M lottery winners in 2004, and definitely more fatalities than winners in a more typical airline fatality year.
If you include general avaition fatalities (ie mostly lightplanes), the annual plane crash deaths outnumber the $1M lottery winners by 10 or 15 to 1.
As to the OP’s exact question, well he asks two. The question of whether there are more plane crash victims or lottery winners can (in principle) be answered conclusively by digging just a little deeper into stats like those I’ve provided.
But that conclusion does NOT even begin answer the question of which is “more likely” to happen to you, or what “the odds” are. Those are very differerent questions and require a LOT more specification of the problem & a lot more data and analysis as other folks have pointed out.
Many people with a bad grasp of probability grossly misuse the terms odds or liklihood. I suspect the OP either doesn’t understand the terms or was just being real loose with them.