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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

I watched this when it was on TV, and it was really interesting, but I couldn't help but keep thinking that even if a plane fell out of the sky every month, it would still be the safest way to travel by orders of magnitude. Though, I guess the point is that improving safety should still be a goal, even if you're the safest already.

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I've idly wondered a couple of times if the industry would be better off from a PR POV if a plane went down every week. Right now a plane crash with fatalities is NEWS with capital letters. This would make it ho-hum.

Then again, if you're averaging one down a week, statistically you'll probably end up with a cluster of five or six+ planes going down within a day or two and suddenly it would be news again, regardless of whether it was actually statistically significant, so shrug

Wouldn't a zero-defects approach work better from a PR and a human perspective?

Part of the reason driving seems much safer to most people is that usually they have agency and are in control of the vehicle and can make their own decisions about weather conditions and likely traffic patterns. Whereas in a plane they are giving up control to someone unknown.

Human perspective, no question! But the PR goal is to "not have bad news in the news", basically. Zero crashes gets you there, but, regrettably, that's basically impossible. More crashes would make a mere crash "not news". But, like I said, probably wouldn't work anyhow. "An auto crash" isn't much news, but bad enough things still happen that they still show up on the evening news with some frequency.

I think the question is whether improving air safety is taking money and/or attention away from reducing more serious threats. (That statement applies equally to "terrorism".)

Right... Remembers me that priced TED talk by Jamie Oliver (www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html) showing how heart diseases and fat were killing much more Americans than murders or cars.

Remind me again why you think it is the safest way to travel?

Statistically, flying is far safer than driving (apologies for not having boating data). The numbers are a few years old, but a quick search dug up the following:

http://www.crashstuff.com/driving-or-flying-plane-vs-car-acc...

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/the-miracle...

http://www.meretrix.com/~harry/flying/notes/safetyvsdriving....

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