Escalating scandal grips airlines including American and Southwest, as nearly 100 planes find fake parts from company with fake employees that vanished overnight::Why are so many flights getting canceled or delayed? Blame a mysterious British supplier accused of falsified documents for plane components.
Planes are vastly safer than trains.
“Passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous motorized transportation option compared. Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 20 times higher than for buses, 17 times higher than for passenger trains, and 595 times higher than for scheduled airlines.”
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/
Worth noting that the per-mile and per-trip stats are different. Planes have low per-mile rates because nobody sane is using a plane to get across town. They only use planes for long-distance trips where driving/taking the train isn’t feasible. So by default, planes will have low per-mile rates because virtually every trip is a high mileage event. In short, planes drastically water down their per-mile averages.
When you look at it from a per-trip viewpoint, cars are safer. Which makes sense. You drive to work hundreds of times per year, but maybe ride a plane twice? So a single car crash is going to be a drop in the bucket when compared to the thousands of car trips you’ve taken in your life, but a single plane crash will be a massive spike in the numbers.
I just wanted to point out how statistics can be used to justify either side. Lots of people want to rely on numbers for everything, as if statistics can’t be manipulated. But they can, and you can bet your ass that if a party has a vested interest in stats showing one result over another, a team of statisticians can figure out a way to make it happen.
In 95% of all car accidents, the driver has eaten carrot in the week prior to the accident.
you may now draw your own conclusion
TIL 95% of people eat carrots at least once a week.
I certainly don’t eat them nearly as often. I also don’t drive, so that checks out.
Fun fact: in WWII the British spread the rumor (rumour, I guess) that their pilots all ate tons of carrots, to make the Germans think that their planes were all about to crash anyways.
Additional consideration: How safe a car trip is, can be influenced a lot by the driver. As a frequent driver (I wished I could use trains instead, but our train system regularly sucks for many connections :( ), I feel that 95+ per cent of accidents could be avoided if the driver was driving careful themselves plus anticipating the errors of other drivers. I get into so many situations that could be dangerous for me as well, but I typically avoid the danger because I see the crazy people maneuvers coming before they execute them. My hopes are that on the occasions when I make a driving mistake, someone else will be there to watch out for me as well.
Long story short: In a plane, you\re putting your life into someone else’s hand. In a car, you at least have the illusion of control, but I claim that you actually do have some control over avoiding accidents.
The same could be said of issues with flights. The difference is you’re not the driver, but also there are many, many more layers of safety in flying.
Only one thing has to go wrong for a car crash, which could easily be completely out of control of the driver and their vehicle (eg another driver). Several things have to go wrong for a plane to crash, the holes in many layers of Swiss cheese have to align.
Thank you, PM_Your_Nudes_Please, for an wonderfully insightful comment on the nature of statistics in transportation accidents.
I don’t really agree. If I have two choices to make a long distance trip, drive or fly, it is safer to fly. If I’m going to the grocery store, there’s no option to fly, so using those type of trips in the calculation doesn’t make sense.
If we talk about the safety of cars vs planes, we should really only be considering trips of a distance where planes are a viable option. Even then a trips per crash seems like a far worse metric than miles per crash. You want to account for complexity of the trips still.
That’s true in general. Planes are very safe overall.
My father has some airlines he’s okay with and some he won’t fly under any circumstances. I’m not talking about overall statistics, but what he knows about the industry’s practices, including mechanical and pilot issues.
Just my .02$
Uhhhh… can we get his list of those he won’t fly on?