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Old 10th Apr 2014, 12:26
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tecman
 
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Perth, WA
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Humans are incredibly bad at judging objective risks. You can probably google the numbers - the ones I recall came from a US study - but scheduled aviation services are the lowest risk form of transport, bettering car transport by a couple of orders of magnitude. Sadly, private aviation is worse than driving, by something approaching an order of magnitude. The old story about the drive to the airport being the most dangerous sector doesn't hold up for non-commercial aviation. Motor cycle riding is off the scale. Statistically, it makes no sense at all for the OP to worry about jet transports, while being happy riding a motor cycle. I don't know the UK figures but the last Western Australian ones for bikes were horrendous: motor cycles are vastly over-represented in fatal accidents.

I'm sure most people these days are familiar with risk assessment formalisms which set out event likelihood versus severity. They are too frequently used as parts of meaningless tick the box corporate exercises but can, in fact, be useful in looking at where the biggest worries in life really reside.
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