Fair comparison of flying to driving.?

Question

Recently, Robert Kiyosaki repeated an oft-quoted idea that flying is safer than driving (http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/article/richricher/19601) based on the number of people killed per year in the activities.

I believe this comparison to be flawed. Another common statistic is that most auto accidents happen within 5 miles of home. This is likely to be because people do most of their driving near their home, and their brains are probably on auto-pilot when they're near home too.

Same principle with flying vs. driving. More people spend more time on the road and more people drive than fly. People driving probably have 2-3 people on average with them, and people flying have 100-200. I think a fair comparison would compensate for miles travelled, the amount of time in transit, leave out the local driving that doesn't substitute for flying, etc.

Would some stastician help me answer this question?

If it's a good question, please gimme a thumbs up!

Answer 1

How dangerous is flying? There are 16 fatal accidents per million hours of general aviation. It is fairly safe to assume that when a plane crashes and someone dies, everyone on board dies. By contrast, the death rate for automobile driving is roughly 1.7 deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles. Car crashes don't always kill everyone in the car so let's use this statistic as provided, which is for an individual traveling in a car rather than for the entire car. So considering that the average airplane accomplishes a groundspeed of at least 100 miles per hour, those million hours of flight push the occupants of the plane over more than 100 million miles of terrain. Comparing 16 fatal accidents to the 1.7 rate for driving, we find that flying is no more than 10 times as dangerous per mile of travel. And since most accidents happen on takeoff or landing, a modern fast light airplane traveling a longish distance might be comparable in safety to a car.

We can also look at safety per hour. This makes sense for recreational pilots who have the alternative of spending a few hours flying around or spending those hours taking a scenic drive. If the average speed of car travel is 50 miles per hour, those 1.7 deaths occur in 2 million hours of driving. This makes general aviation, with 16 deaths per 1 million hours, roughly 20 times as dangerous per hour than driving.

Answer 2

Commercial aviation statistics are given in terms of fatalities per person-mile traveled. With the average speed of a jet about 20 times as fast as a car, those person-miles in the denominator suck the rate down to a VERY small fraction of the highway fatality rate.

The raw number of people killed in aviation accidents is a poor judgement metric for comparison, because an incredibly higher number of people drive each year than fly, so the above system sounds like a much fairer comparison.

Answer 3

Each type of flying will have its own statistics. General aviation (that's the kind other than commercial airline flying) is much less safe than commercial aviation. I don't have the statistics, but if you are thinking of commercial aviation, the answers so far do not address your question.