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Comment by jeron | Hacker News Reader

sometimes ignorance is bliss - I'd prefer not to know the crashes by model and fly without thinking about the statistics

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They’re all dramatically safer than driving to the grocery store, fwiw

Are they? Just at a glance, there is about 1.35 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Assuming I live a mile away from the grocery store, I will need to drive 2 miles round trip. That means I can be expected to be in a fatal accident after around 37 million round trips.

The safest plane on the list is the list is the Embraer E170. It has 0.03 deaths per million flights or one death every 33 million flights. So it’s actually more dangerous. And most people will be flying on Boeing 737s or Airbus A320s which are about 3-20x more dangerous per flight.

In any case, my takeaway is that people drive a lot so the denominator is pretty big. And if we remove driving drunk to the grocery store/driving there on NYE then driving is even safer.

Indeed, airplanes are (as often cited) much safer if one counts per miles travelled, but they are certainly not if counting per trip.

Taking a US-centric look: in 2021 there were 42,915 automotive fatalities in the US [0], and the average number of vehicle trips per household is around 1900 [1], and about 124M households in the US. [2] That works out to ~235B trips, putting the death rate at 0.182 per million trips, or roughly equivalent to the per-trip fatal crash rate of the A330.

So you're right, an individual plane ride is not "dramatically safer" than the average car trip (if anything it's slightly riskier), but people take far more car trips, so the risk adds up. Many years, NTSB reports ZERO deaths from commercial air travel [3], while vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death—not quite top 10, but close.

[0]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...

[1]: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1041-augu...

[2]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410221

[3]: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20211117.as...

It should also be noted that you can reduce your individual risk even further than the mean by avoiding the most dangerous behaviors. Don’t be intoxicated, tired, or distracted. And wear a seatbelt. People who drive dangerously are pushing up the average.

And not to make this about the argument in the thread, but there’s not a lot you can do on an individual level to prevent airplane fatalities. (The flip side of course is you can be blackout drunk on a flight and still be perfectly safe.)

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