
Aviation safety: Transport comparisons - tomerbd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comparisons
======
turbinerneiter
It kinda bothers me how much safer cars are than walking and cycling, given
that most of these deaths are probably caused by cars. ('Caused' not
necessarily meaning the accident was the drivers fault, but the death being
due to the car being big and made from metal vs. humans being soft and
squishy.)

~~~
ajuc
Roads are basically "killing people here is ok as long as you follow few
simple rules" zones. It's insane.

If I told people "I'm going to shoot my gun in the city from time to time - if
you don't want to die please step away when I light this red laser sight" and
then did exactly that and blamed people for not avoiding it - that wouldn't
fly. But cars are so convenient it's allowed.

~~~
seszett
What you're describing is basically what happens in France during hunting
season in the countryside. Luckily, the most frequent victims are the hunters
themselves, but sometimes random hikers too. "But we had put up a sign that
there was a hunting session in the forest!" seems to be a valid defense most
of the time.

~~~
icebraining
"What happens is, men put on bright red hats, and they go out in the woods,
and they shoot at each other. There's no penalty for this, and it's a lot of
fun. Once in a while someone even shoots a deer!"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQyoSLOlglw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQyoSLOlglw)

------
murgindrag
Commercial aviation is super-safe. General aviation is pretty dangerous. The
statistics don't make much sense without those broken apart.

~~~
Nextgrid
Does anyone know why that's the case? Is it just that piston engines (and
single-engine planes) are less reliable than commercial planes with redundant
jet engines?

~~~
t0mas88
The engines aren't the big difference. It's the operating procedures in
commercial aviation that are much different. If I step into a single engine
Cessna in my private time, I'm allowed to fly with almost no equipment, very
little reserve fuel, no plan for an alternate airport, in shitty weather all
by myself.

Now if I step into a plane with passengers (even if it's the same small
Cessna), suddenly I'm no longer allowed to fly single pilot IFR operations
without autopilot, need much higher fuel reserves, need to plan an alternate,
check weather requirements and have done a 6-monthly checkflight and training.
And for most airplanes I would also need a co-pilot, so there are two people
monitoring everything.

Most small airplane crashes are not due to engine or equipment failure, mostly
it's pilot error, and that's where all the extra procedures in commercial
aviation really help.

------
davej
Deaths per KM is 60x lower when flying rather than driving a car. Even for
short haul flights, flying is considerably less deadly than driving the same
distance.

~~~
capableweb
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to measure per travel occasion instead? When
thinking about car travel, the type of road also matters, as does the rest of
the surroundings. True for airplane travel as well, but only arrival/departure
seems to matter most there.

~~~
zbentley
I think per travel time would be better. "Trips" in air and automobiles tend
to be of very different average durations.

------
Tepix
I'm surprised to see buses listed as being much safer per journey than trains.
I guess that's just because "per journey" is a rather meaningless metric.
Train journeys must be longer than bus journeys on average. However, even when
you compare bus vs train on a death per billion km base, the bus is much safer
(0.4 vs 0.6). Is it because on average buses travel slower than trains? How
accurate are these numbers?

~~~
jacknews
indeed, per-journey is entirely meaningless, per-hour is the correct measure
of risk.

~~~
rdtsc
A journey seems like a meaningful unit of work here. Sometimes the start or
end of a journey is more dangerous. The decision to even start journey would
look at the per journey risk perhaps. Think of space launches, as an extreme
example. Risk per distance or per hour, if you consider orbiting for a while,
could be low but risk per journey quite high.

~~~
jacknews
The point is the different modes have entirely different profiles.

You don't fly to the supermarket, or walk to an exotic holiday location.

------
acd
There is a Wikipedia tangent article called Micromorts which is "unit of risk
defined as one-in-a-million chance of death." from a particular activity.

Travel section
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort)

------
ynniv
This is the kind of chat that gives statistics a bad name. How does it make
any sense to compare deaths per journey on foot to skydiving? What even
defines a journey on foot? Why would you include the number of kilometers for
the space shuttle, which is dominated by the arbitrary safe time spent in
orbit, but not for skydiving? It also makes air travel look more dangerous by
combining commercial and non-commercial air travel, while making cars look
safer by separating out motorcycles. Some rigor would make this more honest.

------
ulucs
Considering most daily (commuting, grocery shopping) trips are either very
short or slow due to traffic, I fail to see how this fact is interesting at
all.

~~~
bsaul
I could imagine people have a small background process thinking « i’m taking
my car to go to the office, how much chances do i have to make it safe to the
end » every time they take their car. And same goes for air trips: « i’m
taking the plane to SF, am i going to die ? »

Distance travelled probably is a second thought compared to the concept of
actually having a trip.

~~~
dwd
In a way your are comparing apples to oranges unless you can choose between
either mode of transport for the same trip. Trying to directly compare car and
plane journeys doesn't really make sense. Cars vs buses vs suburban trains, or
planes vs high-speed trains are better comparisons.

For example, comparing the risk of flying or taking the Shinkansen between
Tokyo and Osaka is a fair comparison. But you would probably not choose to
drive that journey.

Interestingly around 50% of car accidents occur within 5 miles of the
individuals home which is barely double the length of an airport runway!

Number of trips may be a better risk measure when comparing plane flights as
most crashes occur on take off or landing. The actual distance traveled is
probably irrelevant.

------
mic47
Yes, because air travel have less trips but quite longer. Title is as fair as
me saying that space shuttle is safer than walking per billion km.

------
jacknews
The pedal-cycle, and many of the walking deaths should perhaps be included in
the 'car' deaths, since that is usually the cause.

------
tpmx
Telling quote from that article:

> Aviation industry insurers base their calculations on the deaths per journey
> statistic while the aviation industry itself generally uses the deaths per
> kilometre statistic in press releases.

------
blendergeek
From the article: "The first two statistics are computed for typical travels
for respective forms of transport, so they cannot be used directly to compare
risks related to different forms of transport in a particular travel 'from A
to B'."

------
jokoon
Why post this? It's not a secret.

What is more worrying is the emissions of air traffic, which is enormous.

If I remember well, a single seat in an air plane is equivalent to a single
car, per unit of distance. So it's like accelerated travel, meaning if you
move a person 1000 km by air, it's equivalent to riding that person 1000km
with a single car. It's the same emissions per distance, except it's done
between 8 and 10 times faster (not considering takeoff).

Imagine replacing a single airplane of 100 passengers with 100 cars who don't
share passengers.

~~~
purple_ducks
Harassment & intimidation of pedestrians & cyclists per billion car journeys
is substantially more than per billion air journeys.

------
aaron695
The fact the discussion is about a table on Wikipedia, an encyclopedia, means
we are at a stupid level.

Which fits why we'd care about 'journeys' over anything meaningful.

But if we pretend there's something to recover here, lets look at the source

"The risks of travel Archived September 7, 2001, at the Wayback Machine. The
site cites the source as an October 2000 article by Roger Ford in the magazine
Modern Railways and based on a DETR survey.

Data would be at least 20 years old, from a random website allegedly from a
Railways magazine allegedly from a DETR survey.

------
Shakezz3
Sure, if you count 5 minute drives to get cigarettes

~~~
jacknews
Exactly, the per-hour rate is obviously the most meaningful, and then the per-
km rate which in some sense includes benefit/risk.

Per-trip is nonsense, since the the different modes entail completely
different trip lengths and distances.

~~~
greenhatman
If you're trying to figure out whether it's safer do drive somewhere than to
fly, the only metric that is relevant is deaths per unit of distance.

------
erpellan
That’s because when a car crashes it’s not typically travelling at 500mph with
250 people on board.

~~~
erpellan
Phrased another way, given the figures of 40 for cars and 117 for planes,
unless everyone on a flight all travelled to the airport together in no more
than 3 cars there’s a higher risk of death on the way to the airport than on
the flight itself.

------
StreamBright
Not sure if this is a meaningful metric. Much better to compare the deaths per
traveled distance.

------
aleppe7766
Yet the research is all about self driving cars.

------
curiousgal
How is this even remotely interesting? Car journeys are far more frequent and
shorter than airplane journeys. It doesn't mean anything.

------
emmelaich
The difference is control. For _me_ [0] the probability of death in an
airplane is higher than the chance of death by car - whether I'm a pedestrian
or driving.

[0] Of course I _could_ be wrong -- but I really don't think so

~~~
jacquesm
The problem here is that everybody thinks that they are a better than average
driver.

