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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

They're still much safer than driving. Are you planning to disable all motor vehicles?

>They're still much safer than driving.

They won't stay that way if this attitude becomes more prevalent.

It's absolutely a problem, and it needs to be fixed, and Boeing should be punished for letting it get this far. But it's not worth disrupting flight plans to very, very, very slightly improve the safety of a mode of travel that is already like seven orders of magnitude safer than driving, which most of us do every day.

just for info, for planes it depends, for daily short-distances (aka, because of the "per trip" risk), they are actually more dangerous than a car. It's true for long-distances, but not for short.

Interesting. Do you have a source for that? Does that include people crashing privately owned airplanes (which I don't think are relevant to this conversation)?

Yes, you can compare figures here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_accident

But it's anecdotal, I mean, realistically, the plane is still better for long distance.

You can sort by journeys, vs, km.

That seems to be sourced from a plain HTML page from 2001, reporting stats limited to the UK through the year 2000[1]. I guess it's not implausible, but it doesn't seem to line up with these more up to date US-based stats[2] where airline deaths are so close to 0 that it's hard to form a meaningful ratio between them and road deaths. If it were truly more dangerous on a per-trip basis, you'd expect the number to at least be a significant fraction.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010907173322/http://www.number...

[2] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

Edit: Very good analysis done by another user, over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40822484

Thanks for finding out the info (especially for digging out the edit), it’s interesting to read

But they aren't safer than various other airplanes.

See: strawman fallacy[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

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