I once analyzed the numbers and flying isn't actually much safer than driving per trip. The numbers look insanely good because they quote them per mile. Google says 1 death in 6 million trips vs 1 in 8 million, if you ask it twice so it actually does the math correctly.
I too did that calculation once and came to the same conclusion as you did.
However, it's important to note that flying keeps getting safer, and has gotten safer over the last decades, so as far as I can tell, flying is now indeed much safer per trip than any other means of transportation
This Wikipedia page cites an IATA report from a few years back with a number of 1:18 million trips.
There's a table in that link that shows air at 117 deaths per billion trips and bus at 4.3, I didn't look into it further, but what numbers are you looking at?
I'm not sure why looking at the incidents per trip would be preferable over looking at the incidents per mile. If I think about comparing two activities when it comes to safety, I feel like I'd want to look at the number of incidents per second of performing either activity.
EDIT: here's a thought experiment. You're taking a trip to the grocery store. You have two routes in mind, the direct one, which takes 5 minutes, and the detour via the North Pole, which will take weeks. One of these trips is safer than the other.
> I'm not sure why looking at the incidents per trip would be preferable over looking at the incidents per mile.
Personally when enter a vehicle and start a trip, I'm interested in arriving at the destination alive, regardless of distance. If something bad happens, whether I die 1km into it, or 10.000km into, is quite pointless. So incidents per trip probably conform better to how people evaluate travel risks.
In most instances, people tend to budget travel by time rather than distance.
All things equal, people tend to budget about (one-way) 10 minutes for shopping, 20 minutes for commuting, and about 3--12 hours for holiday travel.
By foot, that translates to about 1/2, 1, and 6--36 miles (at 3 mph).
By bike, about 2.5, 5, and 45--180 miles (at 15 mph).
By auto, about 5, 10, and 90--360 miles (at 30 mph, typical aggregate speed).
By high-speed rail, 25, 50, and 450--1,800 mi (averaging 150 mph).
By plane, the shorter trips don't make much sense, but 1 hour travel will get you 150 -- 500 miles, 6 about 3,600 mi (continental distance), and 12 hours > 7,000 mi (intercontinental).
Numbers are rough, but for ballpark comparisons should work.
People didn't begin travelling continental / transcontinental distances for holiday or business until air travel was widespread, cheap, and safe. Where exceptional travel was absolutely required it was undertaken, though until the age of steamships, very very few people undertook ocean voyages of more than a few days' duration. Crossing oceans took weeks, if not longer.
It's the direct issue in decision making. You ask "is this trip safe for me to take?", and have example of "it's the same risk as a single car trip to work"
It depends. Are you flying because you need to get to the destination? You will have to do the miles so use per mile. Are you flying for vacation? Is the alternative to just drive to a nearest lake/mountain and vacation there? Then use per trip
They both have their place when used in the appropriate context.
With aircraft, takeoff and landing are the riskiest activities, for example. So per trip reporting is relevant. The scope of what an incident is matters as well.
I'm fairly sure a car trip from NYC to LA has significantly more expected accidents than driving to the corner store. So averaging over all car trips might not make much sense?
All the short car trips 'dilute' the statistics.
In the end, it depends on what question you want to answer with your statistics.
Short trips are more dangerous per-mile, and per-minute, than long trips. A minute of driving to the corner store is vastly more prone to accident than a minute of driving a stretch of interstate. NYC to LA probably has a higher risk than driving to the corner store, but only because you stop by the corner store every so often on the trip. So it may not be the case that the short trips "dilute" the statistics, especially per-mile.
It puts the numbers in context. The risk to any given passenger of taking an average flight (however many miles that is, pretty far) is about the same as the risk of the same person taking an average car trip (a shorter number of miles but still people don't think twice about it).
Deaths aren’t the only negative consequence of auto accidents, however. I imagine if we count serious injuries per mile driving vs flying, the difference would be more stark.
They’re really quite clearly incomparable things. For example, over a two hour drive yesterday, I saw three vehicles with blown out tires and two vehicles stopped on the shoulder and witnessed a nearly serious rear-end accident that was only barely evaded by swerving onto the shoulder, not even to mention the hazardous driving while swerving in and out of lanes, tailgating and close passing, etc.
The point is that it’s simply not comparable because the consequences of air travel are far more significant, not to mention that there are dozens of people doing constant QA and maintenance on regular schedules that do all they can to prevent those major risks from manifesting themselves.
For context; ~42,500 die in vehicle accidents every year in the US. ~380 die in all aviation accidents, which also is largely private planes, which basically combines the worst of both. Miles traveled are utterly irrelevant in this regard, when around almost 3 people die every single day in every CONUS state.
Why would you count trips and not distance? The output of "traveling" is distance, and air travel is by far the safest method of generating that distance.
Measures like accidents per hour or per trip skew the numbers, because air travel generates much more distance per hour and per trip than other forms of transportation.
Imagine when we get the first interstellar ships. Even if 90% of them blow up at launch, it'd still be, by far, the 'safest' method of transit in existence if we use the deaths/mile stat.
Even for planes the stat is deceptive. Most people, hearing about the safety of flight, would think that if they replaced their car with a plane then they'd be far less likely to die in a crash, but that would be untrue because the real risk in flight is take off and landing - the distance traveled is near irrelevant.
If I take a trip to a fixed destination, then per mile (by each mode of transport) makes sense as if gives me the least risky way to get there.
But if I don't care about the destination, and only the risk, then I may simply choose somewhere close enough that the (risk per km * distance) from the other mode(s) of transportation is less than the risk from a flight.
> I once analyzed the numbers and flying isn't actually much safer than driving per trip.
Especially if you compare to highway driving, which I take it is the most similar to flying (as in: people usually don't use a plane as a transportation method to go to the grocery store). When I go to my secondary home, it's 95% highway driving.
In the EU not even 1 in 12 road fatality happens on the highway. You remove all the "between 18 and 25 years old drunk without a seatbelt on a friday or saturday night" accidents on the highways and it's something like not even 1 in 25 fatality happening on highways.
FWIW I very rarely fly. Last time was 2019. I simply hate the whole experience (being packed like sardines inside a tin can ain't my thing but then being treated like cattle at airports is kinda unbearable to me).
If you drove the same distance, you’d have more crashes. So you get more safe miles of travel on an airplane. Trip count is irrelevant, it’s how far you go.
What exactly is a "trip" I think comparing per mile is much better than per trip. I take make two dozen airline trips a year but I can do that many car trips in a week. On the other hand most of my car trips are on the order of a mile or two as compared to several thousand in a plane.
Per trip is also a poor metric, since trips vary wildly in length. I think you want something like accidents per hours of travel, i.e. hours that the vehicle is in active operation.
Don't give in to the temptation to write this off as a trite statistic. If the aviation industry never existed and all those miles were done by road, that's more than 170,000 additional deaths in the US since 2009 [1].
You may argue that not all aviation traffic would convert to road, and I'd agree - so to look at it another way, aviation has created a huge uplift in human potential by enabling more travel than ever with zero (or negative) direct human cost.
Those miles would have never been done all on road so that comparison falls really short. People wouldn't drive coast to coast multiple times a year on business trips, just as they do the same with flying.
But an analogy with hours travelled via plane/car/train/bus would be interesting
If you look at per-trip statistics, trains are six times safer than flying. Per-mile, planes always do much better. Cars just honestly suck for safety, cost, and externalities.
It's also a good example of how public perception and actual stats often differ significantly. If you asked people whether driving or flying were safer, I suspect most would say the former. But statistically speaking, the latter is so much safer it's almost unreal, it's just that the worst case scenarios get a lot more attention there when they do happen.
That said, it is worth noting that an increased focus on safety comes with trade offs. If everything was held to aircraft standards of safety, then every project under the sun would also take significantly longer, cost significantly more and probably be less user friendly for the end user. But that doesn't happen, because a less safe system is often 'good enough' for other fields.
I've tried asking normal people (non-tech) in the past or talking about transportation and it seems pretty clear everyone knows that flying is much safer.
> Apart from nuclear power: that's held to even higher safety standards than flying.
And with good reason. Fukushima rendered large amounts of land uninhabitable for years, Chernobyl to this very day impacts fungi and wild pig meat in places as far away as Bavaria - and that's just the two fatal accident scenarios.
On top of that come all the other incidents - the cleanup of Sellafield for example will cost > 130 billion pounds [1], a result of decades of negligence.
Nuclear power is only financially viable when taxpayers of all the countries surrounding a NPP pick up the bill in the disaster case. Would every NPP be required to obtain actual insurance to account for disasters, it would be among the most expensive ways to generate power.
In contrast, the most damage that a runaway airplane can cause is a few thousand deaths, by piloting it into a skyscraper.
I think you mean that nuclear power generators are required to take extremely expensive safety measures when they handle significant amounts of radioactive materials (several thick concrete walls around the nuclear material, regular thorough inspection of the walls, and so on and so forth). Planes are not required to do that.
However, it's a bit unfair, because the safety regulations for radioactive materials prohibit air transport of such amounts. You're saying that "handle with extreme care" is a higher safety standard than "doing that is forbidden".
What's more surprising is that despite this trade off it's still possible to fly for 50 dollars or less at moments. So I don't feel the trade-off made hinders the economic viability
Having spent a lot of time at a hangar at international airport in Africa and flying there, I can say that there's a thin line between crashes and incidents that could have resulted in a disaster. The former being extremely rare while the latter occurs so frequently it's scary. Between pilot errors, ATC mistakes and bad aircraft/airport maintenance, I've witnessed and heard of many near misses and incidents that have miraculously not turned into something worse. Passengers are completely oblivious what they narrowly escaped.
I often talk about my experience to my peers in Europe. They have similar stories, albeit not happening as frequently. Looking at accident reports on Aviation Safety Network [0] and breakdowns on YouTube such as videos from Mentour Pilot [1], some of the factors that contributed to crashes still occur frequently without resulting in an accident. It's usually a combination of multiple failures that lead to it. My flight instructor used to tell me, every aggravating factor (i.e. lack of sleep, low fuel quantity, complacency, assumptions, etc.) fills a glass which leaves less and less space to luck until it runs over.
What you’re referring to is called the Swiss cheese model, and the many layers that comprise its design are critical to ensuring safety. It’s precisely due to this design that air travel is so safe. Cars are not designed with nearly as many backup systems.
I loathe aggregated stats like these. Combined hours watch time, combined miles traveled, etc... it serves no purpose other than to come up with a huge number.
You'd quickly get into making up new units that are aggregates but you don't call them that and there would be no end of bikeshedding about what "aggregate" means.
Isn't "distance traveled" by a car really just an aggregate of revolutions of the tires?
Then you'll appreciate how the huge number is used to show "just how incredibly safe US airlines have become." No crashes since 2009, wow huge number! IIRC Finnair has the best record, no crashes since 1963 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Finnair_accidents_and...
This is framed misleadingly as a risk calculation, but the math is unfairly generous because planes go a long way and carry a lot of people. It is not a valid calculation for "how likely am I to die if I get on a plane".
Imagine if each plane carried a million people, and traveled a million miles in a single flight, and 1 plane in a dozen vaporized all its passengers. By the logic of the post, you would crunch the same safety number - "passenger miles between accidents" - but we would not call such a mode of transport safe because you have a 1-in-a-dozen chance of death.
If you are going to sum up passenger miles, rather than aircraft miles, you need to compare that against passenger-accidents, rather than aircraft-accidents. Each aircraft crash kills about 100 people at a time, so that "2 light years" figure is two orders of magnitude too generous, right from the start.
There are other arguments to be made about "passenger-miles" as an entire concept (air miles are not always fungible with other modes of transport, and a plane which explodes on takeoff 1% of the time is not safer if you fly it farther each flight) but I'll stop here.
Oh, and fun fact: an Apollo moon mission racked up nearly 3 million passenger miles per flight and did not suffer a single fatality. Even if the astronauts on Apollo 13 had not survived, and the whole program cancelled right then and there, by fatalities-per-passenger-mile a Saturn V to the moon would still be far "safer" than driving, which averages one death every quarter of a million miles.
I think this demonstrates two important flaws with the "passenger miles" concept: 1, miles are not always fungible between modes of transport. 2, intuitively we care more about the risk per trip, rather than the risk per mile.
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However, it's important to note that flying keeps getting safer, and has gotten safer over the last decades, so as far as I can tell, flying is now indeed much safer per trip than any other means of transportation
This Wikipedia page cites an IATA report from a few years back with a number of 1:18 million trips.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety
EDIT: here's a thought experiment. You're taking a trip to the grocery store. You have two routes in mind, the direct one, which takes 5 minutes, and the detour via the North Pole, which will take weeks. One of these trips is safer than the other.
Personally when enter a vehicle and start a trip, I'm interested in arriving at the destination alive, regardless of distance. If something bad happens, whether I die 1km into it, or 10.000km into, is quite pointless. So incidents per trip probably conform better to how people evaluate travel risks.
All things equal, people tend to budget about (one-way) 10 minutes for shopping, 20 minutes for commuting, and about 3--12 hours for holiday travel.
By foot, that translates to about 1/2, 1, and 6--36 miles (at 3 mph).
By bike, about 2.5, 5, and 45--180 miles (at 15 mph).
By auto, about 5, 10, and 90--360 miles (at 30 mph, typical aggregate speed).
By high-speed rail, 25, 50, and 450--1,800 mi (averaging 150 mph).
By plane, the shorter trips don't make much sense, but 1 hour travel will get you 150 -- 500 miles, 6 about 3,600 mi (continental distance), and 12 hours > 7,000 mi (intercontinental).
Numbers are rough, but for ballpark comparisons should work.
People didn't begin travelling continental / transcontinental distances for holiday or business until air travel was widespread, cheap, and safe. Where exceptional travel was absolutely required it was undertaken, though until the age of steamships, very very few people undertook ocean voyages of more than a few days' duration. Crossing oceans took weeks, if not longer.
With aircraft, takeoff and landing are the riskiest activities, for example. So per trip reporting is relevant. The scope of what an incident is matters as well.
All the short car trips 'dilute' the statistics.
In the end, it depends on what question you want to answer with your statistics.
Dead Comment
The point is that it’s simply not comparable because the consequences of air travel are far more significant, not to mention that there are dozens of people doing constant QA and maintenance on regular schedules that do all they can to prevent those major risks from manifesting themselves.
For context; ~42,500 die in vehicle accidents every year in the US. ~380 die in all aviation accidents, which also is largely private planes, which basically combines the worst of both. Miles traveled are utterly irrelevant in this regard, when around almost 3 people die every single day in every CONUS state.
Measures like accidents per hour or per trip skew the numbers, because air travel generates much more distance per hour and per trip than other forms of transportation.
Even for planes the stat is deceptive. Most people, hearing about the safety of flight, would think that if they replaced their car with a plane then they'd be far less likely to die in a crash, but that would be untrue because the real risk in flight is take off and landing - the distance traveled is near irrelevant.
But if I don't care about the destination, and only the risk, then I may simply choose somewhere close enough that the (risk per km * distance) from the other mode(s) of transportation is less than the risk from a flight.
Especially if you compare to highway driving, which I take it is the most similar to flying (as in: people usually don't use a plane as a transportation method to go to the grocery store). When I go to my secondary home, it's 95% highway driving.
In the EU not even 1 in 12 road fatality happens on the highway. You remove all the "between 18 and 25 years old drunk without a seatbelt on a friday or saturday night" accidents on the highways and it's something like not even 1 in 25 fatality happening on highways.
FWIW I very rarely fly. Last time was 2019. I simply hate the whole experience (being packed like sardines inside a tin can ain't my thing but then being treated like cattle at airports is kinda unbearable to me).
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You may argue that not all aviation traffic would convert to road, and I'd agree - so to look at it another way, aviation has created a huge uplift in human potential by enabling more travel than ever with zero (or negative) direct human cost.
[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state....
But an analogy with hours travelled via plane/car/train/bus would be interesting
That said, it is worth noting that an increased focus on safety comes with trade offs. If everything was held to aircraft standards of safety, then every project under the sun would also take significantly longer, cost significantly more and probably be less user friendly for the end user. But that doesn't happen, because a less safe system is often 'good enough' for other fields.
And with good reason. Fukushima rendered large amounts of land uninhabitable for years, Chernobyl to this very day impacts fungi and wild pig meat in places as far away as Bavaria - and that's just the two fatal accident scenarios.
On top of that come all the other incidents - the cleanup of Sellafield for example will cost > 130 billion pounds [1], a result of decades of negligence.
Nuclear power is only financially viable when taxpayers of all the countries surrounding a NPP pick up the bill in the disaster case. Would every NPP be required to obtain actual insurance to account for disasters, it would be among the most expensive ways to generate power.
In contrast, the most damage that a runaway airplane can cause is a few thousand deaths, by piloting it into a skyscraper.
[1] https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1058944/...
However, it's a bit unfair, because the safety regulations for radioactive materials prohibit air transport of such amounts. You're saying that "handle with extreme care" is a higher safety standard than "doing that is forbidden".
I often talk about my experience to my peers in Europe. They have similar stories, albeit not happening as frequently. Looking at accident reports on Aviation Safety Network [0] and breakdowns on YouTube such as videos from Mentour Pilot [1], some of the factors that contributed to crashes still occur frequently without resulting in an accident. It's usually a combination of multiple failures that lead to it. My flight instructor used to tell me, every aggravating factor (i.e. lack of sleep, low fuel quantity, complacency, assumptions, etc.) fills a glass which leaves less and less space to luck until it runs over.
[0] https://asn.flightsafety.org/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot
Isn't "distance traveled" by a car really just an aggregate of revolutions of the tires?
Imagine if each plane carried a million people, and traveled a million miles in a single flight, and 1 plane in a dozen vaporized all its passengers. By the logic of the post, you would crunch the same safety number - "passenger miles between accidents" - but we would not call such a mode of transport safe because you have a 1-in-a-dozen chance of death.
If you are going to sum up passenger miles, rather than aircraft miles, you need to compare that against passenger-accidents, rather than aircraft-accidents. Each aircraft crash kills about 100 people at a time, so that "2 light years" figure is two orders of magnitude too generous, right from the start.
There are other arguments to be made about "passenger-miles" as an entire concept (air miles are not always fungible with other modes of transport, and a plane which explodes on takeoff 1% of the time is not safer if you fly it farther each flight) but I'll stop here.
That being said, such stats as yours do not tell the whole story. The likelihood of dying while driving across the Atlantic Ocean approaches 100%...
I think this demonstrates two important flaws with the "passenger miles" concept: 1, miles are not always fungible between modes of transport. 2, intuitively we care more about the risk per trip, rather than the risk per mile.
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