US airlines transported passengers over two light-years since the last crash
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
All the short car trips 'dilute' the statistics.
In the end, it depends on what question you want to answer with your statistics.
That's possible, but the longer trip is still more dangerous per trip.
EDIT: here's a thought experiment. You're taking a trip to the grocery store. You have two routes in mind, the direct one, which takes 5 minutes, and the detour via the North Pole, which will take weeks. One of these trips is safer than the other.
Personally when enter a vehicle and start a trip, I'm interested in arriving at the destination alive, regardless of distance. If something bad happens, whether I die 1km into it, or 10.000km into, is quite pointless. So incidents per trip probably conform better to how people evaluate travel risks.
But if someone is going on a 10,000km trip and trying to choose between modes of travel, the mode with the fewest incidents per mile will be the safest way.
So for example with flights - I'd imagine the most dangerous parts are the take-off and landing - which happen once per trip no matter how long you fly for inbetween.
So for flights incidents / kilometer are perhaps misleading.
If you really start including risk factors you'll never stop, the risk is proportional to many other factors as well:
1) Time of day: Time of day factors in probably for both flying and driving at varying degrees
2) Where: In the US, which state you're driving in matters significantly for driving fatality rates
3) Day of week: Driving on weekends is more dangerous than driving during the week, doesn't seem to affect flights
4) ATC is a variable for flight accidents but not drivers
5) Flights might actually carry more risk per mile in certain situations: Flying over the oceans, eg
A truly correct apples-to-apples comparison would be so hyper-specific as to be useless.
Yet I suspect the people in twin towers weren't included in airline death stats.
Sure there isn't a perfect single metric - just pointing out that the one the airlines prefer appears to be biased towards air-travel.
The other factor that is often ignored is the issue of control. As a passenger of an airline you have very little impact on the chance of an accident - you are just an accident statistic.
Whereas if you are driving, your own driving behaviour, choice of car, route etc puts you more in control of the chances ( though of course by no means completely ).
This has a big impact on the perception of risk ( as more than average think they are better than average :-) ).
When comparing a difference of 1000x, sure its probably safer.
Your premise is wrong though, it isn't common sense to take a generalized statistic like deaths per km and extrapolate that to be the correct estimate for any particular trip.
The statistic loses all context of differences in vehicles, road conditions, time of day, specific roads, etc. The stat is a great example of how a statistic seems meaningful to get a big picture but is completely useless to us as we can't make any decisions based on a number that is so generalized as to lose all context and meaning.
Assuming that the survival rate is constant as a function of trip length, the empirical estimate of the risk is fully determined by the number of deaths per distance.
Airline travel is much riskier in takeoff and landing phases. A bunch of 200 mile flights is riskier than a 3500 mile trans-con trip.
Car travel is much safer on controlled access highways than 40 mph surface streets.
That's an assumption that doesn't hold up, at least that's the argument I was trying to make above.
Generalizing so much data down to a single statistic makes the number useless. Almost all context is lost, really the only context kept is mode of transportation and distance traveled. That isn't enough to help anyone make a decision for any particular trip.
I think I fly on average a bit more than once every two weeks. I'm in a car about every day, mostly for short trips--in the last month I probably spent about as much time in a car as in a plane. Pilots probably fly more hours than they drive.
You really have to fuck with the statistics to get driving to come anywhere close to commercial aviation in terms of safety, they're so far apart.
You can't influnce that when you fly.
Source?
> You can't influnce that when you fly
Whether you can influence a variable doesn't change its order of magnitude. Unless you're driving on a closed track at low enough speeds that if you pass out you'll be fine, you're safer flying than driving.
Look at accident reasons in the statistics. Velocity is a big part.
Changing the variable doesn’t change the overall order of a magnitude but the personal one.
If you don’t DUI your risk of dying because of DUI is lower
In theory it would be possible to create a safe driving car that would avoid unsafe roads, conditions, mental state, amount of driving, driving practices, speeds, distances etc. But a lot of the time it would just end up not being compatible with the road system and owning a car. And it still wouldn't totally prevent an accident, especially not caused by anyone else.
As someone who does both, the former is still controlled in a way we just don't do for cars.
Note that the moment we go to countries that are actually willing to take people's driver's licenses (and put them in jail when they drive without one, the way you'd expect to be treated flying a plane unlicensed), the safety statistics change. The only way we're getting that in America, however, is with self-driving cars.
(Complications like takeoff and landing might actually make a 10 mile commercial flight riskier, but that isn't an actual option. The 500 mile flight is going to work out safer in almost all circumstances though)
With aircraft, takeoff and landing are the riskiest activities, for example. So per trip reporting is relevant. The scope of what an incident is matters as well.
All things equal, people tend to budget about (one-way) 10 minutes for shopping, 20 minutes for commuting, and about 3--12 hours for holiday travel.
By foot, that translates to about 1/2, 1, and 6--36 miles (at 3 mph).
By bike, about 2.5, 5, and 45--180 miles (at 15 mph).
By auto, about 5, 10, and 90--360 miles (at 30 mph, typical aggregate speed).
By high-speed rail, 25, 50, and 450--1,800 mi (averaging 150 mph).
By plane, the shorter trips don't make much sense, but 1 hour travel will get you 150 -- 500 miles, 6 about 3,600 mi (continental distance), and 12 hours > 7,000 mi (intercontinental).
Numbers are rough, but for ballpark comparisons should work.
People didn't begin travelling continental / transcontinental distances for holiday or business until air travel was widespread, cheap, and safe. Where exceptional travel was absolutely required it was undertaken, though until the age of steamships, very very few people undertook ocean voyages of more than a few days' duration. Crossing oceans took weeks, if not longer.
The point is that whether you crash in the first mile or the last mile, you still crashed on a trip. Since you can’t count 9999mi safe, and 1mi deadly then you’re realistically doing statistics on trips, then multiplying by miles but this just inflates the numbers and muddies the waters.
The multiplication by miles isn’t obviously wrong but it’s definitely misleading. It’s the kind of thing that sounds relevant but isn’t really.
If you are going on holiday, you have a time budget for reaching that particular destination. With a car you would maybe choose places within a drive of 3 to 11 hours (at highway speeds), whereas a plane would maybe be between 1 hour and 16 hours. But then a longer road trip might also be more dangerous.
Current commercial helicopter transfer service from Manhattan to JFK (about 15 miles) is scheduled for about 5 minutes:
In your second example, you're missing the point. People tend not to take longer road trips out of a safety budget but a time one. With a limited vacation time budget, time spent travelling (unless that's the point of the vacation) is lost. Auto-based vacations tend to be closer to home.
Also for the most flights the alternative is not driving or riding a train, but not travelling at all over that distance.
Examples: 1) unnecessary business trips ("that meeting could've been an email"); 2) long-range vacations ("let's travel somewhere local 1-2 hr by car instead of 3-6 hr by plane")
Measures like accidents per hour or per trip skew the numbers, because air travel generates much more distance per hour and per trip than other forms of transportation.
But if I don't care about the destination, and only the risk, then I may simply choose somewhere close enough that the (risk per km * distance) from the other mode(s) of transportation is less than the risk from a flight.
I was thinking more along the lines of: I'm in Berlin, and it's possible for me to visit friends family in the UK by train* or by plane. If I want to visit them, I pick one of those options (plus the option of ferry or train for the channel).
If I want to go to the shops, my options are bus or walk*.
If I want to just go somewhere on holiday and I don't care where exactly, I can take the bus, trains, planes, etc., and pick my destination to taste, and at that point it's min( P(death or injury ∣ x ∈ destinations, y ∈ modes of transport) )
* not by car, I would have had to transfer my license within 6 months of moving here and I didn't, so it's not valid any more
Even for planes the stat is deceptive. Most people, hearing about the safety of flight, would think that if they replaced their car with a plane then they'd be far less likely to die in a crash, but that would be untrue because the real risk in flight is take off and landing - the distance traveled is near irrelevant.
However, it's important to note that flying keeps getting safer, and has gotten safer over the last decades, so as far as I can tell, flying is now indeed much safer per trip than any other means of transportation
This Wikipedia page cites an IATA report from a few years back with a number of 1:18 million trips.
How exactly the risk of flying compares to other modes of transportation on a per-trip basis is a difficult question to answer really well, I couldn't find one place aggregating up-to-date statistics.
If you look here https://accidentstats.airbus.com/generations-of-jet/, they say that "generation 4" aircraft (e.g., Boeing 787 or Airbus A350) have a fatal accident rate of 4e-8 per journey.
That would make those airplanes about twice as safe as car travel in the US on a per-trip basis according to this paper https://academic.oup.com/aje/article-abstract/166/2/212/9878....
Unfortunately the 4e-8 number can't be compared directly to the fatalities per billion journeys numbers from the table you cite, since fatal accidents include accidents where at least one person died, including things such as accidents with personnel on the ground where all passengers were safe.
If we ignore this and assume a 100% death rate, that would put flying in the same ballpark as car-based transportation from the table you cite, but more dangerous than a bus by almost a factor of 10. This definitely overestimates the danger of flying, possibly by a lot, since there have not been any hull loss accidents with those aircraft models so far.
I think the general conclusion holds that flying has in the last few decades become comparatively safe even on a per-trip basis (at least on modern aircraft).
But I haven't found great data enabling a detailed comparison to other forms of transportation.
The point is that it’s simply not comparable because the consequences of air travel are far more significant, not to mention that there are dozens of people doing constant QA and maintenance on regular schedules that do all they can to prevent those major risks from manifesting themselves.
For context; ~42,500 die in vehicle accidents every year in the US. ~380 die in all aviation accidents, which also is largely private planes, which basically combines the worst of both. Miles traveled are utterly irrelevant in this regard, when around almost 3 people die every single day in every CONUS state.
Especially if you compare to highway driving, which I take it is the most similar to flying (as in: people usually don't use a plane as a transportation method to go to the grocery store). When I go to my secondary home, it's 95% highway driving.
In the EU not even 1 in 12 road fatality happens on the highway. You remove all the "between 18 and 25 years old drunk without a seatbelt on a friday or saturday night" accidents on the highways and it's something like not even 1 in 25 fatality happening on highways.
FWIW I very rarely fly. Last time was 2019. I simply hate the whole experience (being packed like sardines inside a tin can ain't my thing but then being treated like cattle at airports is kinda unbearable to me).
You may argue that not all aviation traffic would convert to road, and I'd agree - so to look at it another way, aviation has created a huge uplift in human potential by enabling more travel than ever with zero (or negative) direct human cost.
[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state....
But an analogy with hours travelled via plane/car/train/bus would be interesting
That said, it is worth noting that an increased focus on safety comes with trade offs. If everything was held to aircraft standards of safety, then every project under the sun would also take significantly longer, cost significantly more and probably be less user friendly for the end user. But that doesn't happen, because a less safe system is often 'good enough' for other fields.
However, it's a bit unfair, because the safety regulations for radioactive materials prohibit air transport of such amounts. You're saying that "handle with extreme care" is a higher safety standard than "doing that is forbidden".
And with good reason. Fukushima rendered large amounts of land uninhabitable for years, Chernobyl to this very day impacts fungi and wild pig meat in places as far away as Bavaria - and that's just the two fatal accident scenarios.
On top of that come all the other incidents - the cleanup of Sellafield for example will cost > 130 billion pounds [1], a result of decades of negligence.
Nuclear power is only financially viable when taxpayers of all the countries surrounding a NPP pick up the bill in the disaster case. Would every NPP be required to obtain actual insurance to account for disasters, it would be among the most expensive ways to generate power.
In contrast, the most damage that a runaway airplane can cause is a few thousand deaths, by piloting it into a skyscraper.
[1] https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1058944/...
Not really. The number of deaths per Joule is orders of magnitude lower for nuclear than for eg coal; and that includes all the infamous nuclear disasters like the one in Chernobyl. But we still allow coal fired power plants.
We could drop the cost for nuclear power, by lowering the safety standards to the same as that for eg natural gas or photovoltaic.
> Would every NPP be required to obtain actual insurance to account for disasters, it would be among the most expensive ways to generate power.
I doubt it; but I am in favour of internalising externalities, like when coal plants emit pollutants, or for nuclear powers plants, like in your examples. Bonds and insurance are a way to make sure those rare risky externalities are also paid for.
It's not just about the deaths! Factor in the amount of land contaminated in a worst-case scenario and the duration of such a contamination and suddenly the entire comparison shifts in its result.
A NPP blowing up or getting damaged enough to spew radiation in a densely settled Western country impacts potentially hundreds of millions of people for decades. A coal plant blowing up? No one cares, maybe a few hundred people die and a few thousand lose their jobs - even the biggest coal power plant in Poland employs 8.000 people [1].
[1] https://www.kulturaustausch.de/en/issues/issue-iii-2021/whit...
(Even if you just look at radioactive contamination only. Coal ash is so high volume that even just the radioactive traces in it add up. But honestly, radioactivity is probably the least of your worries with coal.)
I agree an open lignite pit isn't the best of all sights to have around... but they displace a few thousand people at most, and at least in Germany they are paid off handsomely for their cooperation. Fukushima in contrast had half a million people displaced at its peak, many of them even had to leave their pets behind to fend for themselves.
> Coal ash is so high volume that even just the radioactive traces in it add up
Agreed, but even that pales against the waste that uranium mines produce - and to make it worse, we at least have some sort of audit and oversight capability over domestic mines, but for uranium mines the situation is much more complex. Out of the relevant producers [1], not even 20% come from stable, developed and relatively corruption free Western nations (Australia, Canada).
We just ignore the issues with uranium because we don't have them in front of our doors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
I often talk about my experience to my peers in Europe. They have similar stories, albeit not happening as frequently. Looking at accident reports on Aviation Safety Network [0] and breakdowns on YouTube such as videos from Mentour Pilot [1], some of the factors that contributed to crashes still occur frequently without resulting in an accident. It's usually a combination of multiple failures that lead to it. My flight instructor used to tell me, every aggravating factor (i.e. lack of sleep, low fuel quantity, complacency, assumptions, etc.) fills a glass which leaves less and less space to luck until it runs over.
[0] https://asn.flightsafety.org/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot
Isn't "distance traveled" by a car really just an aggregate of revolutions of the tires?
Imagine if each plane carried a million people, and traveled a million miles in a single flight, and 1 plane in a dozen vaporized all its passengers. By the logic of the post, you would crunch the same safety number - "passenger miles between accidents" - but we would not call such a mode of transport safe because you have a 1-in-a-dozen chance of death.
If you are going to sum up passenger miles, rather than aircraft miles, you need to compare that against passenger-accidents, rather than aircraft-accidents. Each aircraft crash kills about 100 people at a time, so that "2 light years" figure is two orders of magnitude too generous, right from the start.
There are other arguments to be made about "passenger-miles" as an entire concept (air miles are not always fungible with other modes of transport, and a plane which explodes on takeoff 1% of the time is not safer if you fly it farther each flight) but I'll stop here.
That being said, such stats as yours do not tell the whole story. The likelihood of dying while driving across the Atlantic Ocean approaches 100%...
I think this demonstrates two important flaws with the "passenger miles" concept: 1, miles are not always fungible between modes of transport. 2, intuitively we care more about the risk per trip, rather than the risk per mile.
I guess it's an article both about the US and about airtravel, so they're gonna use freedom units.
Why?
Ly, parsecs and AU are intuitively useful in astronomy in a way e.g. Pm are not. They’re also both trivially convertible yet not commonly converted. If anything, quoting in SI because someone’s being dogmatic is more likely to introduce errors as everyone converts to the customary units. (Airplanes aren’t astronomical entities. But the author is making an astronomical analogy.)
But interestingly if you divide a light-year by 117 Billion (the number of people ever alive according to [0]) it comes down to about 80 000 km per person (coincidently 2x the Earth circumference). If the average life-span was 80 years, that would bring the daily travelled distance to 2.7km per person, or 5.4km if average life-span was 40. 5.4k is easily done in an hour (especially by people walking as their main mode of transport).
So yeah, maybe all people that ever lived together walked somewhere between 1-10 lightyears together. So all in all, not that much compared to US airlines in the last 15 years.
[0]: https://info.nicic.gov/ces/global/population-demographics/ho...
Actual values may vary, but within an order of magnitude, humans collectively do probably walk about a lightyear per year or so.
This is just wrong. Atlas Air Flight 3591 was in 2019, with the loss of 3 souls on board. And it was a regularly scheduled airline flight, just cargo, not passenger. Still an airline crash by a US airline on US soil.
Also, Alaska Air 1282 was a very near miss, and it's only pure luck that the door didn't take parts of the tail with it, which could have been catastrophic.
Reasons include a mix of equipment, flying on the wrong side of the clock (often by low-time pilots with other jobs), lots of single pilot ops, driving for the lowest possible cost and highest dispatch rate, less oversight (and a little bit more cowboy as a result), and lots of short legs to airports with shorter runways, fewer runways, and often less services (snow removal, ATC, de-icing, etc.)
Pure luck though with the whole Boeing thing. There's no particular reason why those 350-odd dead in two crashes couldn't have happened to an US airline. (It would've been better for aviation safety if it did).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
And it wasn't referenced anywhere other than the glossary which explained what the abbreviation meant, so they had no chance.
That’s what Boeing was counting on (and was terribly wrong in retrospect).
True, but in practice, not so
American pilots had two things for them here:
1) more aware of maintenance needs of speed sensors (and probably better SOPs as well regarding disagreeing sensors) and
2) more experience with flying manually (on older 737s even) and acting correctly if MCAS went haywire
(This showed up in Google but I think the 1st answer, rather than OP is right here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416050 - of course now we have the FAA report)
And also the door blowout, in which Boeing employees forgot to put bolts back in, because they sidestepped the system, wasn't a crash only thanks to pure luck. The door could have easily taken parts of the tail with it, potentially severing horizontal/vertical stabilisers, hydraulics, etc. It could have been a very deadly affair.
Oh, and risk of catching an infection in the plane or airport is higher than in your own car - and that outweighs both crash and radiation risks..