Safety comparison - flying to driving

[TXCAP4228]

My thoughts are with the families and the victims of the recent aviation tragedies. It started me to thinking and I did some research.

I got this off of a Department of Transportation website.

Click here for the chart.

Quick summary

Probability of dying in an auto accident: 1 in 6300

Probability of dying in the crash of a large or regional air carrier airplane: 1 in 1,568,000


This is verbatum from the website:

The fatality rate in currently about 1.7 fatalities per 100,000,000 vehicle miles in 1994-1998, or about 1 fatality per 60,000,000 miles. Another way of looking at this is that if a person drove about 600,000 miles in their lifetime (12,500 miles per year for 50 years), there is about 1 in 100 chance that person will die as a result of an automobile accident during their lifetime.

Flying is still safer. Just not as sensational as car crashes.

No news stories will report the hundreds of people who die this week in car crashes. Why is that?

 

[wxman13]

You said it--plane crashes get media attention because they are "sensational" and have nice images of smoking wreckage to go along with them.

Blame it on the fact that most mainstream media outlets are owned by large corporations, so ultimately what gets covered has to produce a profit by drawing in more viewers who will see the ads. Consumers (as distinct from citizens) care about bloodly/gory/messy/fiery news, not upbeat news about how no one died in a commercial airliner last year. It's a vicious cycle, but many people have turned into consumers when it comes to news because television provides immediate images that weren't available before its time.

This is absolutely no excuse for shoddy and incomplete reporting and rampant speculation, as we saw this morning with the US Air crash, but explains why it happened: great images (in the eyes of the news director/producer), feeds on people's fears, and on and on.

Peter

 

[Timebuilder]

Wxman is right. If it bleeds, it leads.

Another aspect of this is why auto crashes are not so sensational. For one thing they happen all the time; from the small fender bender to the major pileups like the one that was reported this morning, due to foggy conditions. Even the big car crashes have a limited lifespan in TV news. Within hours, the accident is cleared, and life goes on. A small number may have died in each vehicle, and we have become desensitized to this becuase of familiarity.

In the case of an airplane accident, the crash site is cordoned off, and can be observed for hours, perhaps days, generating hours of video tape, talking heads, celebrity deaths, early speculation, smoking ruins, and pledges to investigate the causes.

If cars could fly, perhaps there would be parity. We both know that the FAA will never allow a flying car that does not fall under some kind of aircraft category, and therefore, those devices will be "airplanes that can be driven", rather than "cars that can fly".

 

[bobbysamd]

Flying v. driving v. stupid news reporting

As my instructor always told me, the most dangerous part of a flight is the drive to the airport.

To add to Timebuilder's comments, you can count on your hand the number of people per 1,000 who don't understand cars and driving. Multiply that by 50 or more and the result will be the number of people who don't understand airplanes and flying. To most people, airplanes, flying, aeronautics and pilots is an esoteric, black art akin to witchcraft and magic (well, it is magic, isn't it?). Therefore, even routine airplane "mishaps" are blown way out of proportion by ignorant news reporters and news directors. I can say that because I worked in radio news for several years.

My favorite, used in the sense of the preposterous, was my assignment the day that Challenger went down. My assistant news director assigned me to go to the airport to get reaction to the tragedy from PILOTS. I told him I thought the assignment was stupid - but I had to do it anyway.

Perhaps if newsies were better informed about airplanes there would be less sensational (to us as pilots) aviation news reporting. However, don't expect TV to exercise restraint. If TV can get good video of anything, it'll be on your 10 o'clock "news."