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Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft.

Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1]

So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that.

[0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...



All I'm saying is: if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, the drive to the airport wasn't more dangerous than your flight on the plane.

This is intuitive and obvious and yet is somehow beaten out of us by "quick facts" that we accept blindly touting commercial aviation as some kind of miracle. It's still a miracle but not quite to the degree that people believe. Hurtling through the sky at 0.8 Mach in a metal tube will always be more dangerous than rolling down a highway in a metal cage at 70 mph.

None of the people who responded to me yet have refuted this.


> Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles.

Which is vanishingly small.

It means the average driver can expect to be a fatality in an automobile accident once ever one to two hundred years or more.


If you drive a fairly typical 12.5K miles per year, it will take you 8000 years to drive 100M miles.

“Or more” technically includes a factor of 20-80x, but I think you were way low.


Thanks. Sloppy work.

I’m half an Australia away from my usual internet-rant tooling, and I find multi-tab cross referencing on mobile pretty unenjoyable.




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