That's certainly true in the sense that flying from NYC to LA is 750x safer than doing the same as a road trip, on a fatalities-per-km basis. But on a per-trip basis, boarding that flight will be about equally as safe as taking a 5 km trip by car to the hardware store, and above-average defensive driving can certainly boost that radius considerably, maybe to 50 km.
Some would argue the per-trip comparison is invalid, but often the travel distance is not fixed, such as if you were weighing between vacation options of flying to NYC vs camping at a local campsite.
On a danger-per-hour-in-vehicle basis, airplanes of course still come out ahead, although not quite as overwhelmingly. NYC to LA is about a 5.5 hour flight; an equivalent drive would be about 350 km, and it will be very hard to match the safety of that flight even with defensive driving. You'd need to drive 70x better than average, even with the fatigue of a 5.5 hour drive.
> In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html
So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regularly? Let's assume 2 hours a day for 52x5 = 260 working days in a year. So given that we have 43K traffic fatalities per year let's compute fatalities per hour of driving. 100M * 2 * 260 / 43K = 1.2M So we have 1 fatality per 1.2M hours of driving. At the same time we have roughly 1 fatality per 100K hours of flying. Oops!
Of course one should consider that:
(a) it's 2007 data, it's probably lower now (10 times lower?),
(b) we definitely cover longer distances per hour of flying (by the way not that much, 60 mph vs 600 mph is within 10x difference),
(c) it's probably all flying, including private, but I'm not considering just public buses either.
Add defensive driving though, and it's not that obvious which is safer.
peter422|2 years ago
mitthrowaway2|2 years ago
Some would argue the per-trip comparison is invalid, but often the travel distance is not fixed, such as if you were weighing between vacation options of flying to NYC vs camping at a local campsite.
On a danger-per-hour-in-vehicle basis, airplanes of course still come out ahead, although not quite as overwhelmingly. NYC to LA is about a 5.5 hour flight; an equivalent drive would be about 350 km, and it will be very hard to match the safety of that flight even with defensive driving. You'd need to drive 70x better than average, even with the fatigue of a 5.5 hour drive.
cedilla|2 years ago
vc8f6vVV|2 years ago
> In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html
So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regularly? Let's assume 2 hours a day for 52x5 = 260 working days in a year. So given that we have 43K traffic fatalities per year let's compute fatalities per hour of driving. 100M * 2 * 260 / 43K = 1.2M So we have 1 fatality per 1.2M hours of driving. At the same time we have roughly 1 fatality per 100K hours of flying. Oops!
Of course one should consider that:
(a) it's 2007 data, it's probably lower now (10 times lower?),
(b) we definitely cover longer distances per hour of flying (by the way not that much, 60 mph vs 600 mph is within 10x difference),
(c) it's probably all flying, including private, but I'm not considering just public buses either.
Add defensive driving though, and it's not that obvious which is safer.