Originally Posted by
Thridle Op Des
My drive to work has a hundred fold risk of an accident over my next flight to Kuwait or Houston (actually probably a bit more here), my personal focus remains obstinately on the flight and not the drive.
This isn't really on topic, but I can't help it, I have to give a comment to the "flying is safer" claim. I'm not afraid to fly at all and think the risk is reasonable under normal circumstances. But, I see the comparison of flying vs driving "risk" as cynical propaganda from whoever makes money on aviation - not a fact. I'm pretty sure they do something "creative" like comparing number of accidents per travelled distance (or even worse, per "passenger distance" which means to multiply the actual distance travelled with the number of passengers) when coming up with these numbers.
That doesn't really give a fair or even interesting basis for risk comparison for many reasons. The typical air trip is much longer than the typical road trip. I'm pretty confident that the comparison looks very different if you for example compare the risk of death per trip.
There are also other factors of the equation. The survivability of an accident with a car is much higher than with an airplane. Most technical faults on a car isn't critical, you can usually just stop. On an aircraft that might not be true, you have to trust whoever designed and manufactured the aircraft much more than with a car.
I think the fact that you have much less influence on the outcome also makes us consider flying more risky, even though that isn't expressed through statistics. When you drive a car you can to a large extent decide the risk yourself. In an aircraft you're to a larger degree depending on procedures made by someone else that you just have to trust that is safe. To me at least, the degree of control I have if something bad happens is a vital part of my risk assessment.
I'd also say that the "quality" of the drivers is much higher on aircrafts than in a car. If you lowered the bar for flying an aircraft to the same level as for driving a car, we would have a LOT of accidents. That impacts the statistics, but doesn't really apply when you compare the risk when the same person drive a car or fly a plane.
I don't intend to take this off-topic by making this a discussion, my point is simply that I think our brains has some good reasons for judging flying more risky than driving.
Here is a couple of links for anyone interested in the subject:
Flying Or Driving: Which Is Safer?
Driving Versus Flying: The Debate Is Settled! | Observer