The fact that airplane travel is safer than cars is a myth invented to promote airplane travel.
Well, it is not fully a myth, but to get to that result they measure per mile, and that greatly favor airplane travel.
If you instead measure how likely you are to die on your next trip, then the dangers of airplane travel will significantly exceed car travel and other means of transportation.
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).
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.
Sweden , a country of 10 million, we have about 150 people killed per year from car accidents
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. :)
Since 1997, the number of fatal air accidents has been no more than 1 for every 2,000,000,000 person-miles[c] flown,[citation needed] and thus is one of the safest modes of transportation when measured by distance traveled.
So I guess this is the point you are trying to make?
Well, what I want to know is "Am I going to die today?". The distance traveled is irrelevant to answer that question. The only reason to add that to the equation is to make air travel look safer.
I honestly think you are showing a fundamental lack of understanding of statistics.
"Per trip" is a horribly poor metric. Because there is a fundamental difference between a trip down to the store, or a cross country trip, even with a car. Also it would be extremely dependent on where you are going, where you live etc. etc.
For the discussion to have any meaning you have to abstract it to a metric that makes sense for all people, or else you would have to also figure in where you usually travel, how good a driver you are etc etc etc.
At that point its a completely meaningless semantics exercise because for instance taking a plane to work is not realy valid for me since i live in the same city as i work... Or lets do it the other way around: If i need to go to Spain tomorrow, its safer for me to fly then to drive there. (This is based on your own sources)
But per mile measurement for flying implies that every mile of a flight is equally dangerous, but the truth I'd that it is most dangerous to start or land, which is a per trip occurrence. The take off and landing is equally dangerous whether you travel a long or short distance in between.
It's still a terrible metric to compare the safety of modes of transport and the Wiki article just below the table explains it well:
The first two statistics are computed for typical travels by their respective forms of transport, so they cannot be used directly to compare risks related to different forms of transport in a particular travel "from A to B". For example, these statistics suggest that a typical flight from Los Angeles to New York would carry a larger risk factor than a typical car travel from home to office. However, car travel from Los Angeles to New York would not be typical; that journey would be as long as several dozen typical car travels, and thus the associated risk would be larger as well. Because the journey would take a much longer time, the overall risk associated with making this journey by car would be higher than making the same journey by air, even if each individual hour of car travel is less risky than each hour of flight.
If people made similar trips with cars as they do with airplanes, cars would lose in the per journey metric big time.
In the end it becomes an exercise in trying to find the metric that best supports your argument.
We have also been jumping around a bit on geographical limitations. And in for instance Scandinavia, the original premise might be closer to real due to better road safety.
I think implying some sort of myth or ruse is missing the mark hard on this subject.
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:
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.
I sort of answered this somewhere else but i will reiterate.
Using this metric you are sort of assuming all trips are equal.
No matter how short, or long you are assuming the base danger is the same. This means that driving 100 meters is just as dangerous as driving for a whole day. (See what the problem is?)
And if we look at this premise in isolation: "Am i going to die on this trip"?
If the trip is 100m, then a plane is probably out of the question either way.
And if the trip is to a different country.. then hey, look at that, the sources you cited come into relevance (where pr distance a plane is safer) and you would have to calculate the danger of completing that specific trip in a car VS flying that distance with a plane.
You are generalizing on terms that make no sense, since "total number of trips" in cars include all manner of different scenarios of some times extremely varying degree of danger. So in order to have data that is statistically relevant and in any form comparable you have to choose a different metric.
So to answer the question again "Am i going to die on this trip?" or to extrapolate "should i drive or fly on this trip", if you cant use generic statistics, the answer will be "it depends. You have to calculate danger for the trip specifically".
I'd guess it's because unicycles are used in a much narrower range of circumstances. Few people are being hit by cars commuting to work on a unicycle, nor are there many mountain-unicyclists getting injured.
You joke (I think?), but the people I know that do unicycling (including mountain-bike style unicycling, and unicycling Himalayan trails, and crazy stuff like that) do do an insane amount of training 😆
You’d have to. Anyone who mountain bikes regularly knows how much work it is to climb some trails with 500% gear range. I can’t imagine the work involved with a single gear to climb on some trails. Brutal.
This is probably another reason why unicycles are less dangerous. People I know that do mountain biking end up in hospital from time to time from coming off at speed, speed on most unicycles is probably a lot lower. Though I thought geared unicycles existed?
There are basically no unsafe ways to get off of a unicycle. You can fall in any direction and just end up standing next to your unicycle. Compare that to a bicycle "over the handle bars"-accident.
Edit: sorry that's not true, see this from the Netherlands:
Voor het vierde jaar op rij kwamen meer fietsers (270; 39%) dan inzittenden van personenauto's (194; 28%) om in het verkeer. De meeste doden in het verkeer vallen onder ouderen: in 2023 waren 375 (55%) verkeersdoden 60 jaar of ouder. Kinderen (0-14 jaar) komen juist relatief weinig om in het verkeer; in 2023 waren dat er 20 (3%).
Het risico om te overlijden in het verkeer, het aantal verkeersdoden per afgelegde kilometer, is het ho ogst voor gemotoriseerde tweewielers. Het risico voor brom- en snorfietsers en motorrijders is ongeveer dertig keer zo hoog als het risico voor inzittenden van een personenauto. Voor fietsers en voetgangers is het overlijdensrisico respectievelijk acht en zes keer zo hoog als voor auto-inzittenden, in de periode 2012-2021.
Translation:
For the fourth year in a row, more cyclists (270; 39%) than passenger car occupants (194; 28%) were killed in traffic. Most traffic fatalities occur among the elderly: in 2023, 375 (55%) traffic fatalities were 60 years or older. Children (0-14 years) are relatively rarely killed in traffic; in 2023 there were 20 (3%).
The risk of dying in traffic, the number of traffic fatalities per kilometer travelled, is highest for motorized two-wheelers. The risk for moped and light-moped riders and motorcyclists is approximately thirty times higher than the risk for passenger car occupants. For cyclists and pedestrians, the risk of death is eight and six times higher, respectively, than for car occupants, in the period 2012-2021.
Are hot air balloon not like super safe, last accident I think was a guy that made his own DIY hot air balloon but before that it has been relatively safe. I think America has only seen like less than 800 deaths total.
in this cartoon, the lady character says : "Easy - - just memorize it as the first three prime numbers, if you realise you couldn't remember what came after 2 and started to panic and get them increasingly wrong"
first 3 primes : "2, 3, 5"
forgot 2nd : "2, ..., 5"
then, get the next primes : "7, 11"
... increasingly wrong : "not 518 ? ?"
No, either it's a bad one or I'm missing something.
https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2937:_Room_Code
Cueball and Megan are on vacation or otherwise traveling, and receive a code for their hotel room. Megan gives a seemingly nonsensical and unhelpful mnemonic by which Cueball can remember it... which, inexplicably, actually helps Cueball to remember the code. Cueball becomes VERY angry on realizing this.
The first three prime numbers are actually 2, 3, and 5. So this technique easily identifies the first two digits "02". "05" is slightly wrong because it's not the second prime number, it's the third. And "18" is more wrong because it's not actually a prime number, it's 2 x 3 x 3.
So the mnemonic itself doesn't really provide the method for remembering the code. Instead, figuring out how to apply the bogus mnemonic will reinforce your memory of the code.
xkcd
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