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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

"yet air travel remains one of the safest forms of transportation available"

Doesn't that depend on how you measure it, like accidents per miles or accidents per hours? Even if it would be safest by miles, I don't think it would follow that the safest way to get to work every morning would be by plane. It only works because airplanes go long distances, and accidents most frequently happen during starting or landing. In short, the comparison is not even very useful.

The question is also do we have to fly so much/do we need so much energy. If there were no airplanes, would people just travel the same distances by car? I doubt it.

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Whether you measure by hour or by mile air travel is still comparatively safe (1/4th as many fatalities per hour and 1/60th as many fatalities per mile, compared to automobiles).

this is a testament to safety measures in aviation, not to some inherent safety of air travel.

inherently, 99.9% of people will die if plane was to collide with another plane or ground. That number is inherently much lower for car collisions.

so if we talk about nuclear safety, yes it is very safe compared to some other energy sources. But it also so much more dangerous when nuclear accidents happen than anything else.

"But it also so much more dangerous when nuclear accidents happen than anything else."

This is a facile assumption but it's almost certainly false. The Banqiao dam disaster killed 25,000 people directly, and destroyed 6 million buildings (it caused 145,000 further deaths due to famine). Such a disaster far outstrips even Chernobyl, which was about as maximally bad as any nuclear reactor accident can be (runaway fission reaction generating massive amounts of radionuclides; no worthwhile reactor containment structures; the reactor core melting down, catching on fire, and spewing huge amounts of radiation into the wind).

now please factor in duration and affected area and population into account when talking about severity of nuclear accidents, the same way you factored in hours and miles when you wrote about aviation safety.

> Whether you measure by hour or by mile air travel is still comparatively safe

The problem with that measure is that air accidents don't correlate with either hours or miles, but with takeoffs and landings.

The comparable incident for cars is probably intersections.

Yes, each plane trip involves only one takeoff and landing while each car trip usually involves multiple intersections, but that just means that simple comparisons don't tell us very much.

What's important for humans is whether spending time in an airplane or in a car is more dangerous and whether choosing to use an airplane or a car for a trip is more dangerous. In either case the airplane is safer than the car.

Most car crashes occur near the home, at distances that make air travel impractical. Who drives to the airport to fly 3 miles? Comparing "car miles driven on trips" to air miles would be more enlightening.

As was explained, it is a function of the number of takeoffs and landings. Therefore it only holds because airplane trips tend to be a lot longer than trips with other vehicles.

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