And it's not like driving is especially safe. It's just that traffic deaths are so routine that they're not generally widely reported, while pretty much every major issue with an airplane gets national attention. In the US, traffic deaths amount to the equivalent of a fully loaded 747 lost with all hands every couple days.
Whether it’s true or not, I feel like I control my fate when driving a lot more than when flying. I can take precautions (defensive driving, avoiding bad conditions, etc.) but have little to no control once I board a plane.
It is true that you control your fate more when driving. Once the door shuts on the plane you have little ability to do anything other than get yourself arrested.
Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 was a Boeing 737-700 that experienced an uncontained engine failure[a] in the left CFM56-7B engine after departing from New York–LaGuardia Airport en route to Dallas Love Field on April 17, 2018. […] One passenger was partially ejected from the aircraft and sustained fatal injuries[…]
The numbers would go up quite a bit if it included private and military. The numbers you linked to seem to have a very tight definition of which flights were considered, as the Wikipedia list showcases several more in-flight deaths involving air carrier class airplanes than just two.
I don't understand how you arrived at the number 51. Did you just tally up all the incidents in that list that occurred after 2009?
That list includes a bunch of incidents that are not really relevant for assessing risk level when flying on a commercial airline:
- Someone committing suicide by getting sucked into a plane engine while the plane was on the ground.
- Someone sneaking onto a runway and getting struck by a plane that was landing.
- Another person stealing a plane and intentionally crashing it into the ground.
- The Kobe Bryant helicopter crash.
Looking through the list I would conclude the parent comment was correct. The only incidents with passenger fatalities on US airlines since 2009 were Southwest 1380 and PenAir 3296.
Airplanes are inherently much, much less reliable than cars and only reach reliability through however many millions or billions of dollars worth of redundant systems and maintenance intervals and however many man-hours. That means that when you get on an airplane, you are extremely reliant on those systems and processes having been followed.
We are seeing more and more that these systems and processes have been breaking down, from regulation to manufacturing to pilots to systems to maintenance.
It really is hard to compare, but for an airplane, a passenger has to have faith that literally hundreds of thousands of people and things have done their job correctly. When I drive my car, I am much less reliant on people, systems, and processes, as cars are just plain simple. Most leople barely change their oil or check tire pressure. I even once had a complete engine failure and was able to just roll to a stop from highway speeds. Furthermore, I am in control. If I am too tired, I don't drive. I can pay attention to other drivers. I am directly responsible for maintenance. Etc.
I think it's hard to compare airplanes to cars by numbers alone. There are subtleties that are not exposed by numbers.
For an airplane passenger, it is absolutely a risk. You rely on so much happening correctly, and you are not in control of any of it. As little bits in that chain of things that need to happen don't happen correctly, percentages of failure and death go way up, and fast.
And we haven't even discussed in-flight medical emergencies, as there are actually quite a few in-flight deaths every year that would likely not yield a death if the medical emergency happened on the ground.
> There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.
Wikipedia says there has been 51, not counting private or military. And that list doesnt include American aircraft flying overseas, to which the MAX planes would add hundreds.
People die in cars due to medical emergency all the time. I even know someone who had a heart attack and it caused him to hit a utility pole and die. We just don’t have any way of tracking it, whereas the FAA keeps very detailed statistics.
You’re leaving out the biggest risk: other people. Most deaths, in planes or cars, are caused by human error. In a car you’re dependent on everyone going down the road (and there may be thousands in one trip) not drifting across the median. You’re dependent on the person coming the other way at an intersection to stop. Etc.
Traffic deaths have been climbing again after decades of decline, probably due to distracted driving. Driving is much more dangerous.
And that is why I think it is absolutely, mind bogglingly bonkers that Tesla is currently using "drive by wire" in a mass production car when this technology is not common in aviation at all. Only the huge airliners that benefit from extremely expensive maintenance schedules use full "fly by wire".
Drive by wire isn’t the problem. You already have tons of electronics in a 10 year old car, from the ECU to ABS. However, there are relevant important standards and certifications in aviation, and I’m not sure if vehicular certs are as strict.
Yes it will be when you loose all power while going 80mph on a motorway because rodents ate the wiring 10 years later.
"tons of electronics" in modern cars is not required for the most basic functionality such as steering and braking. Yes, you loose power steering and power breaking if it goes off, but you can still drive (unless maybe you've never driven without it and it surprises you during a high speed takeover manouver etc).
This "drive by wire" takes away the most essential security feature present in "all" cars up to now. A direct mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the wheels. Even manufacturers of small airplanes (like "executive" 8 seater jets) say "no way" to this tech unless it controls an auxiliary control surface.
Putting it in a production car that will get crashes, it will corrode (yes copper wiring and insulation corrodes too), it will get attacked by rodents and it might get driven in 50 years from now as a "classic" is sheer, unabridged, stupidity of the highest order.
No, not just cost. Take a cessna columbus. An 8 seater executive jet. They chose to put fly by wire only on flaps. Is it because of cost? I doubt it. Pilots like "fly by wire" and people would gladly pay a 100k more for it on a $27 million aircraft. Even back in 2009 when it was still available.
Because when trying to compare different things (car, train, plane, space ship, etc), they all travel at different speeds, by different methods, with different categories.
An example? Travel to the moon would be the safest thing ever, even if 50% of the ships exploded, because of how far it is. I bet travel to Mars would the safest thing ever, based upon miles, even if 99% of the ships exploded.
Things break based upon two things. One is maintenance per trip. And each trip has riskier parts, of which start and end are parts. Planes have issues taking off and landing, a lot more than cruising. Same for space ships. Even cars have issues at start and end of trip, if you're driving very long distances.
Your car won't fall out of the sky in the event of a malfunction so I guess cars are safer "when something goes wrong"? Then again cars travel with less margin of error to other cars and objects than airplanes.
An airplane falling out the sky is something like the equivalent of the wheels falling off of a car traveling at speed. It's not that it can't happen, but it's hardly the only possible result of a malfunction.
There's also a giant speed difference plus the fact that a car will decelerate even if uncontrollably for basically any mechanical failure. Even at speed vehicle accidents are quite safe comparatively to a plane that has lost its ability to fly. A plane tends to have all or nothing incidents while vehicles have lots of accidents with a wide variety of severity.
Naturally that tends to push aviation towards avoidance of mechanical issues and on cars we are much more tolerant. I've seen people driving cars with their door duck taped on!
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.
The report you seem to be citing is this one, which summarizes the data on General Aviation flights. Those are small private planes. Commercial air transport is not part of General Aviation.
Yep, I'm not actually claiming that driving is safer per se, but it's apples vs oranges. I'm also not sure about 24M hours, total commercial airlines hours (i.e. aircraft hours, not passengers') is around 14M/year in 2018 (link in my other comment), so we need to multiply by the average number of passengers. Which gives >1B hours/year for commercial airlines only.
If that door had hit horizontal stabilizer though we would have had a completely different statistics even with 1B hours. Fortunately it didn't happen, but with the current trend the idea that flying is always safer may become not so obvious, and "orders of magnitude" thing may disappear pretty fast.
IMHO the comparison is to inform the decision point of whether to fly or drive somewhere, so the inputs should be limited accordingly: exclude drives that couldn't reasonably be flown.
Is it safer on average to do a long road trip, or fly? Historical crash data on long road trips (excluding commutes, local errands, etc.) probably doesn't exist, but if it did, that would be very preferable. Perhaps people crash more when driving unfamiliar roads, with additional fatigue of long durations, with additional distraction of kids, etc. Or perhaps routine drives are worse because one lets their guard down!
Statistics is a tricky thing. There are 43K traffic fatalities in the US per year and 53K deaths from colorectal cancer. Which means chances of dying from colorectal cancer is higher than dying in a traffic accident. Well, over a lifetime, but distribution over age can be different etc. In the same way 43K fatalities are not an even distribution over region, type of driving, destination, age etc.
Of course I have to admit that flying commercial airlines is safer by average numbers, in the US and for now. But if we estimate total flying hours as 1.3B/year (http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Docum... times 100 passengers per aircraft) it only takes 1300 deaths per year to make it even with average traffic fatalities. If that flight had been unlucky enough to go down we would have had 177 deaths, already not "orders of magnitude safer" than driving. And the trend is not good.
But again, we are comparing apples to oranges. Driving is a very different experience, both long and short trips. Nobody chooses to drive from Boston to LA just out of fear of flying (well, maybe there are exceptions, but "nobody" is still a very accurate word). As for short trips, changes of getting into an accident in urban area driving to the airport is probably higher than driving in the other direction towards your destination. Again, it depends.
This is roughly accurate for general aviation (people taking a Cessna out for a ride on a weekend, etc.) - it is about 10x deadlier than driving and the rates have been pretty stable for decades.
If you look at just airlines, they’re in turn 10x _safer_ than driving if I remember correctly. There’s this anecdote that after 9/11 people were afraid to fly and died on the highways in much higher numbers. There’s also the fact that there there was a very small number of passenger deaths involving airliners in the US in over a decade (meaning no major crashes). Compared to thousands and thousands of traffic deaths a year that should drive the point home, even when you have to adjust for base rates.
I only feel like I control slightly more than 50% of the situation with defensive driving. There's very little you can do for example if someone decides to rear end you.
Especially since, most of the time, they weren't intending to rear end you and therefore may be going far too fast to reasonably slow down in time. In my town of 1200 we had a death recently where a driver (no seatbelt) was speeding through a 45 MPH road and somehow didn't see the loaded dump truck stopped to turn left at a construction site. Full speed contact, his vehicle veers to the right and into the ditch. He was either killed instantly or when he hit the ditch.
Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash. There's still a chance of you getting ambulance on road accidents but you're plummeting to your death on major aircraft malfunction.
> Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash.
It isn't though. Airliners have suffered in-flight engine explosions and decompressions multiple times since 2001 without fatalities. The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959. Modern airliners don't just fall out of the sky. They feature robust designs and highly competent crews.
Cars regularly crash fatally without mechanical failures at all. And that says nothing of the dire state of car maintenance among the general population.
> The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959.
While I agree with your point, if the scope is scheduled airline flights in the USA, AA flight 587 crashed on 2001-11-12; globally, Egypt Air 804 on 2016-05-19. There have also been a few close calls, such as Qantas 32 on 2010-11-04, and collisions can also occur, such as that between BAL flight 2937 and DHL slight 611 on 2002-07-01, and Gol Transportes Aéreos flight 1907 with a business jet on 2006-09-29. And, given the topic is things going catastrophically wrong at altitude, there is AF447 on 2009-06-01.
It feels like this should be true, but your chance to survive a serious in-flight mishap are actually really good. Like a 90%+ chance of survival.
How can that be? Very few serious in flight mishaps STAY in the news for more than one day, but proportionally MANY mishaps that lead to death stay in the news.
This incident has juice because it's a Boing 737 series aircraft.
It may be hard to believe what I wrote here, and it would be hard to verify if you just look at the general news. You'll need to look at specialized air transport reporting to see the baseline of major mishaps.
While I think it’s good to keep things in perspective and recognize that statistically you’re more likely to die on the ride to the airport than on the plane itself, it needs to be said that these statistics shouldn’t lead to a complacent mindset especially because the redundancies in aviation can lead to such a mindset.
Slowly but surely we see more cutting corners in aviation, especially in the US.
This ranges from trying to evade certification for planes to crew hours, to more lax regulation on how air traffic is managed to increase movements at airports, to overworked and understaffed ATC.
I don’t think it has risen to levels that affect statistics in terms of death, but the statistics in terms of near catastrophic events has risen over the years.
True, but it's not an apples-to-apple comparison. If you compare by miles, then flying wins by a lot. If you compare by hour, it's much closer (though I'm pretty sure flying still wins, yes).
Only commercial. If you add in General Aviation with some random poorly maintained Cessnas from the 70s piloted by some randoms in their 70s then it's a completely different picture.
I've heard that private aviation and private driving have comparable accident rate, which makes sense. Now I wonder how's the rate of both public transportation.
According to this chart https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... buses and trains have 0.02 to 0.04 deaths per 100,000,000 miles travelled. This compares to 0.01 deaths in the commercial aviation. So pretty much on par, but if you switched to deaths per hours of travel, which is IMHO better statistic, assuming that a average plane flights say 10 times faster than a bus/train (800km/h vs 80km/h which seems reasonable) then the commercial aviation is actually less safe, but not by a big margin either, within the same order of magnitude.
Because people generally spend much more time driving cars and being on the trains and buses than being on a plane. The intuitive reading of the statistics of accidents is 'how likely it would happen to me in my _lifetime_', and not based on how much you actually fly or drive. For such intuition one would need to compare the same amount of time spend in either mode of transport because they would represent the same amount of somebody's lifetime.
No, not at all. Given that people generally spend more time in cars than on planes, assuming that they spend the same time on each, as is tacit in treating per passenger hour risk as comparable to a lifetime risk, is flat out wrong. You'd need to know the expected total time or distance traveled by each mode.
By your logic death per miles travelled by different mode of transport statistics would be useless, too, precisely for the same reasons you are stating, that is needing to know how many miles you actually travelled using each mode of transport as it's not immediately obvious if average person gets more miles on a plane than in a car in his lifetime.
However, it's immediately obvious that an average person spends more time in car/bus/train than on a plane, and you are agreeing with it. So deaths per hours travelled is actually better as it gives you some immediately insight. If fly and car/bus were the same in deaths per hour you know straight away that car is less safe because you spend more time in a car.
>By your logic death per miles travelled by different mode of transport statistics would be useless, too, precisely for the same reasons you are stating, that is needing to know how many miles you actually travelled using each mode of transport
Yes, if you want to calculate a lifetime risk, you must know (or estimate) a lifetime usage.
>So deaths per hours travelled is actually better.
It really isn't. Does the average person spend as many times more time in cars as planes are faster than cars? If so, per mile risks would be comparable to lifetime risks. The average person probably spends more time in cars than that, though that still leaves per mile risk as closer to accurate (for the average person. Are you the average person?). But neither per mile nor per hour risk should be conflated with lifetime risk, and if you're not going to use personalized assumptions about usage, it's much better to just look at actual mortality data to avoid the issue entirely. For most comparisons though, risk/cost/pollution/whatever per passenger (or for goods, ton) mile is probably by far the more useful measure. If something needs to get from A to B and you need to know what that entails or what the best option is, those are the more directly relevant figures.
I'm not really sure which metric is better but one logic of using per hour is that I think vehicle breakdown occurs more likely the more hour they're active, not the more distance they travelled https://www.lytx.com/blog/measuring-engine-miles-to-hours-to... . Also chances of external condition like weather ruining your trips are also more likely with more time because forecasting can only go so far.
Not if you consider general aviation statistics and instead stick to the commercial planes only. And anyway these statistics are kinda massaged because they compare amount of miles travelled instead of comparing amount of time spend travelling.
