True, but it's not an apples-to-apple comparison. If you compare by miles, then flying wins by a lot. If you compare by hour, it's much closer (though I'm pretty sure flying still wins, yes).
Only commercial. If you add in General Aviation with some random poorly maintained Cessnas from the 70s piloted by some randoms in their 70s then it's a completely different picture.
I've heard that private aviation and private driving have comparable accident rate, which makes sense. Now I wonder how's the rate of both public transportation.
According to this chart https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... buses and trains have 0.02 to 0.04 deaths per 100,000,000 miles travelled. This compares to 0.01 deaths in the commercial aviation. So pretty much on par, but if you switched to deaths per hours of travel, which is IMHO better statistic, assuming that a average plane flights say 10 times faster than a bus/train (800km/h vs 80km/h which seems reasonable) then the commercial aviation is actually less safe, but not by a big margin either, within the same order of magnitude.
Because people generally spend much more time driving cars and being on the trains and buses than being on a plane. The intuitive reading of the statistics of accidents is 'how likely it would happen to me in my _lifetime_', and not based on how much you actually fly or drive. For such intuition one would need to compare the same amount of time spend in either mode of transport because they would represent the same amount of somebody's lifetime.
No, not at all. Given that people generally spend more time in cars than on planes, assuming that they spend the same time on each, as is tacit in treating per passenger hour risk as comparable to a lifetime risk, is flat out wrong. You'd need to know the expected total time or distance traveled by each mode.
By your logic death per miles travelled by different mode of transport statistics would be useless, too, precisely for the same reasons you are stating, that is needing to know how many miles you actually travelled using each mode of transport as it's not immediately obvious if average person gets more miles on a plane than in a car in his lifetime.
However, it's immediately obvious that an average person spends more time in car/bus/train than on a plane, and you are agreeing with it. So deaths per hours travelled is actually better as it gives you some immediately insight. If fly and car/bus were the same in deaths per hour you know straight away that car is less safe because you spend more time in a car.
>By your logic death per miles travelled by different mode of transport statistics would be useless, too, precisely for the same reasons you are stating, that is needing to know how many miles you actually travelled using each mode of transport
Yes, if you want to calculate a lifetime risk, you must know (or estimate) a lifetime usage.
>So deaths per hours travelled is actually better.
It really isn't. Does the average person spend as many times more time in cars as planes are faster than cars? If so, per mile risks would be comparable to lifetime risks. The average person probably spends more time in cars than that, though that still leaves per mile risk as closer to accurate (for the average person. Are you the average person?). But neither per mile nor per hour risk should be conflated with lifetime risk, and if you're not going to use personalized assumptions about usage, it's much better to just look at actual mortality data to avoid the issue entirely. For most comparisons though, risk/cost/pollution/whatever per passenger (or for goods, ton) mile is probably by far the more useful measure. If something needs to get from A to B and you need to know what that entails or what the best option is, those are the more directly relevant figures.
I'm not really sure which metric is better but one logic of using per hour is that I think vehicle breakdown occurs more likely the more hour they're active, not the more distance they travelled https://www.lytx.com/blog/measuring-engine-miles-to-hours-to... . Also chances of external condition like weather ruining your trips are also more likely with more time because forecasting can only go so far.
Not if you consider general aviation statistics and instead stick to the commercial planes only. And anyway these statistics are kinda massaged because they compare amount of miles travelled instead of comparing amount of time spend travelling.
