this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
655 points (98.0% liked)
xkcd
8975 readers
4 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is complete horseshit.
Are you aware how many flights take place every day?
Vs
How many fatal accidents pr flight?
The fact is that almost every time a fatal accident happens in a (commercial) plane anywhere in the world, you hear about it. Because if a plane crashes a lot of people die in one dramatic (and rare) event.
Fatal car accidents litteraly happen every minute of every day. Almost none of them go on the news. (Cause reporting them all would be impossible).
Let me also post some sources, since you did not:
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/
https://www.icao.int/safety/iStars/Pages/Accident-Statistics.aspx/ Air traffic: (3187 fatalities over 10 years)
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries (1.19 million people every year die on the road)
I think you underestimate the number of trips per car per day. Most people will take more trips by car per month than they will fly for their lifetime. In Sweden , a country of 10 million, we have about 150 people killed per year from car accidents, yet most adults travel by car daily. That is millions of trips per day, and only half a death.
Yes, and how many die every year from plane crashes in sweden?
If we take a relatively big plane (450 passengers) as an example. One has to fall out of the sky every 3. Years to match the car accident number...
3186 deaths over 10 years VS 1.19 million every year.
(This is globally. Sweden and Norway(where i live) will naturally have pretty radically lower numbers then globally when it comes to road safety.)
But look at that air travel number again: 3186. Over 10 years. Globally. Commercial Air travel is fucking safe. Its horrible for the climate. But its safe.
Whatever way you slice those numbers it comes up air travel i safer. Feel free to find actual statistics that contradict me. :)
I think I get what the guy is trying to say. Per journey, air travel might indeed end up being statistically less safe (how many times a year an average person flies vs. how many times they drive their car) but of course the question is whether that particular metric is any useful. Surely if you replaced all airplane trips with car trips, more people would die.
This Wikipedia article contains a table, which if true, confirms it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comparisons
If you sort it by Journeys, you'll find that 117 people die in an airplane per billion journeys, while only 40 die per billion car journeys. But the article points out exactly what I said before.
Funny example that illustrates how important the choice of metric is, is the Space Shuttle which is statistically incredibly unsafe per journey (17,000,000 deaths per billion journeys) and even per hours (only skydiving coming first by a small margin) but is safer than bicycles and only twice less safe than cars per distance traveled because of those insane distances it covers in orbit.
Edit: Not that I do not know whether the table counts only commercial flights or all airplane/helicopter journeys. And also the statistics is pretty old (1990-2000) and only covers the UK, so you may still be right and commercial air travel in the last decade might be safer per journey than cars globally. Can't find a better statistics.