First off I was astonished to learn that there wasn’t a bigger difference in statistics.. I sort of thought it was in the range of 2:1 – 4:1 more dangerous flying RW than FW. I must have been living in a cave..
95% of all statistics lie. 80% of all people know that...
rotorcraft had an accident rate of 9.47 per 100,000 aircraft hours flown, vs. 8.38 for fixed wing aircraft, and a fatal accident rate of 2.14 vs. 1.70 for fixed wing planes
Those numbers are nearly worthless if you are trying to compare R/W to F/W safety from a pilots perspective.
When a single commercial airliner falls out of the sky, hundreds of people die. Two of them are pilots. When a helicopter crashes, there will be a lot less fatalities, but still one (or two) dead pilots.
As an example: To get a fatality rate of around 2 deaths per 100,000hrs,
one commercial airliner with 200 people on board has to crash every 10 million flight hours.
To get the same fatality rate of 2 deaths per 100,000hrs,
one hundred helicopters with 2 people on board have to crash every 10 million hours.
Of course, there are a million other factors in the real world that need to be looked at when comparing statistics like that. For example, I assume that a commercial F/W airline pilot spends more hours per year in the air than the average R/W pilot.
If you want to find out how safe a heli pilots job _statistically_ is, look at a "crew member" or "pilot" fatality per years on the job statistic.