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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.

https://www.aopa.org/-/media/files/aopa/home/training-and-sa...

The last passenger death in a US Commercial Air Carrier was in 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_and_in...

Even assuming your 24-million flight hour number, that would mean 1 death over 100-million flight hours from 2020-2023.



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.




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