How much safer is flying than driving

Airbags, seatbelt design, automation, and other new features make new cars far safer than older ones. Still, your odds of dying in a car crash are 1 in , while your odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 9, Also, the vast majority of airplane-related deaths are from private planes, not commercial flights.

And even with that in mind, flying by private plane is still safer than driving. Even knowing the statistics, you might still feel nervous when the plane takes off.

What is it about flying that feels so risky? But even more than that, popular news coverage makes plane crashes sound far more common than they really are. Meanwhile, plane crashes are rare and can result in a long list of injuries and deaths all at once. This makes for a vivid news story. And it also makes plane crashes seem to happen a lot, since the news spends much more time talking about plane crashes than about car crashes.

Second, road travel that competes with air travel is on the rural interstate system, not on average roads. Third, driver and vehicle characteristics, and driver behavior, lead to car-driver risks that vary over a wide range.

Expressions derived to compare risk for drivers with given characteristics to those on airline trips of given distance showed that year-old, belted, alcohol-free drivers of cars pounds heavier than average are slightly less likely to be killed in miles of rural interstate driving than in airline trips of the same length. That means that any time you board a flight on a major carrier in this country, your chance of being in a fatal accident is one in seven million.

In fact, based on this incredible safety record, if you did fly every day of your life , probability indicates that it would take you nineteen thousand years before you would succumb to a fatal accident. Nineteen thousand years! Perhaps you have occasionally taken the train for your travels, believing that it would be safer. Think again. Based on train accidents over the past twenty years, your chances of dying on a transcontinental train journey are one in a million.

Those are great odds, mind you. But flying coast-to-coast is ten times safer than making the trip by train. How about driving , our typical form of transportation? There are approximately one hundred and thirty people killed daily in auto accidents. In , five hundred million airline passengers were transported an average distance of eight hundred miles, through more than seven million takeoffs and landings, in all kinds of weather conditions, with a loss of only thirty-nine lives.

A sold-out jet would have to crash every day of the week, with no survivors, to equal the highway deaths per year in this country. Barnett of MIT compared the chance of dying from an airline accident versus a driving accident, after accounting for the greater number of people who drive each day. Can you guess what he found? Whereas the odds of dying in a car crash are approximately 1 in While these statistics seem convincing, several things must be considered.

First, most air travel making up these statistics falls under flights governed by 14 CFR Part These are commercial air carriers. Commercial airlines are heavily regulated by federal law. Most importantly, commercial airlines have strict standards for maintenance of aircraft, inspection, and pilot training.

Given these strict standards, you seldom hear of major airlines crashing. Therefore, the majority of flights making up these flight safety statistics involve heavily regulated aircraft and flights. What the air travel safety statistics do not highlight is that the majority of deaths that occur from aviation crashes result with aircraft that are governed by 14 CFR Part 91 General Aviation , 14 CFR Part 20 or more capacity aircraft and 14 CFR Part commuter, air taxi, charter and on demand aircraft.

They rarely involve commercial aircraft that are governed by Part