Your 'scientific standpoint' misses out the fact an average commercial aircraft has two orders of magnitude more people on board than an average car. Based on your deaths per hour stats we can reasonably assume the chance of fatality-inducing failure from a given flight hour is roughly two orders of magnitude less than an hour in the car.
When I'm boarding an aircraft, I care more about that than how many people would die with me.
I am not clear on that - are you saying that if you were to somehow hypothetically replace all your car travel with plane travel for an equivalens amount of time, your chance of death would go down by 100x? I am just thinking about it, and I don't think that it works out that way.
tbf I'm assuming that what the article calls "passenger flight hours" is more accurately described as "flight hours by a passenger airliner", based on the figure looking very wrong otherwise. Looking at ICAO's figures for that year there were 0.03 fatalities per 100m passenger km from airliners, so dividing through by a sensible average kph figure gives something in the region of 0.2 fatalities per passenger hour, or 30x safer than the car with sober driver. (You get to 100x quite easily by avoiding using airlines based in regions that contribute disproportionately to aviation accidents)
This is of course abstracting away from details like the aircraft travelling 10x further and walking to the airport, but the real problem is aircraft not serving the routes you want to drive. General Aviation is a lot more dangerous than commercial flights, especially when it involves clumsy pilots ;-)
That would be a use of the term more consistent with aviation norms, but then the quoted figure would be very wrong (or based on a very different category of aircraft than the commercial airliners we're discussing here
When I'm boarding an aircraft, I care more about that than how many people would die with me.