CONTINUOUSIMPROVEMENTPAL RUINS EVERYTHING (You've been lied to: It is not safer to fly)

Have you seen the television show on TruTV titled “Adam ruins everything” where Adam Conover destroys our perception of everything from green technology to the real origins of Christmas.

Here is my attempt to do just that with statement we all are led to believe namely,

It is safer to fly than to drive

You have heard the old saying: “You are more likely to get killed driving to the airport than flying on the plane” then people will go on and on about how much safer it is to fly than to drive.

But is this really safer to fly than to drive?  Not really!

Fact: You are over 280% more likely to die in a plane crash than driving in a car.

How can that be…….are the experts wrong?

I believe it is because experts are using a flawed metric namely, miles:

When you look at the statistics online, most all articles use the metric of “miles.”

For example, there are “X” number of deaths per million miles for a car and there are “Y” number of deaths per million miles for a commercial flight.

Passenger Mile?
 

First, the concept of a passenger mile, although used in the travel industry, can certainly skew the numbers (to the positive) to the extreme.  For example, if a flight with 500 passengers travel from Los Angeles to New York (approximately 2400 miles), then the statisticians would say that flight had 1.2 million passenger miles.  With around 34000 flights a day, that is tens of billions of passenger miles a day. Certainly there are millions of miles traveled by the big commercial airliners in the U.S. everyday…but not BILLIONS.

This creates the case where you have a very large denominator in the equation (# of deaths / passenger mile) and the larger the denominator, the smaller the overall chances are they say.

Also, due to the jet stream, distances between destinations on the ground and in the air are different.  

For example, a flight from the west coast to the east coast despite being the same miles apart will be a quicker flight (i.e. reducing the chance of dying in a plane because you are in it a shorter period of time) That same exact flight from east to west will be longer (i.e. increasing the chance of dying in a plane because you are in the plane longer.) In a car, driving 100 miles at 50 miles per hour would take you 2 hours while driving that same 100 miles at 40 miles per hour would take you 2.5 hours. Using their logic, the risk of getting in an accident are exactly the same, whereas I argue that the 2.5 hour trip would give you an extra half hour for something to go wrong.  

Also, someone can certainly die in a car without having traveled any miles or an airplane without it flying any distance yet.

Most importantly:

• Pilots training time (which has a significant impact on safety) is logged in flight hours…not miles 
• Airplane maintenance schedules (which has a significant impact on safety) are in flight hours…not miles

Why shouldn’t our metric be something we can make most common to each.

To eliminate as much variation as possible I will use the most consistent metric regardless of anything else, which is time. The total time in an airplane and total time in a car….regardless of the actual miles traveled.

Automobile results

There is an average of 220 million cars on the road on any given day in the United States for an average of 1.5 hours each.  Multiplying these two numbers gives us the total number of “Car Hours” per day in the United States. The actual number is 330 million car hours / day.  

Annually there are about 34000 car deaths, which make the daily average for car deaths about 93 per day. If you want to determine the number of car deaths per car hour, you simply divide 93 car deaths by 330 million car hours.  The number is 0.00000028 (deaths / car hour).  This also represents the probability that you will die in a car accident in one hour of driving or the odds are 3,533,568 to 1. 

Please note: This is not the same as deaths per hour…..it is deaths per car hour.  To determine the number of deaths per hour, you would divide 93 daily deaths by 24 hours, which is 3.8 deaths per hour somewhere in the United States.

Commercial Airline results

There is an average of 34,000 commercial flights in the United States every day with an average flight time of let’s say 2.5 hours….some are more and some are less but 2.5 hours is a conservative number (that is about the same as flying from Phoenix to Portland.  In actuality there will be years pass with no major incidences and then, unfortunately, there will be an accident resulting in many deaths…but if you average up the previous 10 years or so….you will arrive at a number anywhere from 25 – 35 per year or so, but for our purpose…I use 25 airline deaths per year to be conservative and skew the numbers to be "safer".

Multiplying these 34,000 commercial flights and 2.5 hours gives us the total number of “Flight Hours” per day in the United States. The actual number is 85,000 Flight hours / day.  Annually there are about 25 commercial flight deaths annually, which make the daily average for commercial flight deaths at about 0.0685 per day. If you want to determine the number of commercial flight related deaths per flight hour, you simply divide 0.0685 deaths by 85,000 flight hours.  The number is 0.00000081 (Deaths / flight hour).  This also represents the probability that you will die in a commercial flight in one hour of flying or the odds are 1,234,566 to 1.  

Please note: This is not the same as deaths per hour…..it is deaths per flight hour.  To determine the number of deaths per hour, you would divide .068 daily deaths by 24 hours, which are 0.0028 deaths per hour.

Do you see it…..the odds of dying in a car hour is 3,533,568 to 1 while the odds of dying in a flight hour are 1,234,566 to 1!

The chances of being killed in any one hour on a plane are 286% greater than that in a car.

The perception that planes are safer, in my opinion, stem from the fact that there are far fewer airplanes flying than there are cars driving. With a whopping 220 million cars on the road daily with only 34,000 commercial flights it’s no surprise there are more car related accidents…

But what would it look like if the number of flights hours equaled the number of car hours per day…that is to say, what if there were 361,644 flights a day in the United States….

There would be over 97,000 commercial airline deaths a year…that is about 260 deaths each day…..basically a commercial jetliner crashing almost daily.

It’s all about how you present it….rhetoric if you will, to persuade others to believe something or infer that because one scenario is safer…all scenarios are safer.

For example, if you said the following:

”You are more likely to die in a car crash while driving from Los Angeles to New York than flying from Los Angeles to New York.”

Then yes, that would be correct……WHY…..because it takes almost 800% more time to drive than to fly to New York from Los Angeles, therefore increasing your chance of dying in a car crash. 

In reality both driving and flying are extremely safe.  The actual odds of dying in a 2.5 hour plane ride are still very small (about 1:500,000 in my example.)

To give you some perspective on how remote this is....the chances of a person being struck by lightning in their lifetime is about 1:3000

You could spend your entire life riding on an airplane (and never getting off) and still not ever crash…..but to say that flying is safer than driving is not accurate.

Still don’t believe it. Take a look at any top ten most “Dangerous Jobs” list and see that airline pilots always rate more dangerous than professional drivers.

All of my referenced statistics were obtained from legitimate sources found on the internet.

I encourage you to play around with my numbers. Be more conservative….or less conservative with my averages and see that this is the case.