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.
