For those who avoid thinking by citing traffic fatalities. I calculated the deaths per passenger mile traveled in the USA; .000000015. That's 7 zeroes to the left of the decimal point. That's because cars in America rack up miles in the trillions. Everybody seems so impressed at the level of activity in the sky. But we have about 250-300 million cars in America. The majority do trips daily. Lots of trips and miles like you can't believe. Air travel is an exceptional thing, surface travel is the rule. 43 thousand fatalies are pretty exceptional when you multiply 365 days times hundreds of millions of miles every day.

SO which figure did you use for the number of cars? Your "about" varied by 25%.....

..and from where diid you get the number of miles travelled by each and every car in the USA.....??

Just trying to understand how you came to a figure at all.....

Being brutally honest, its unfortunate when 1 or 2 people die in a car accident, its a tragedy when 200 die in a plane crash.

Its mostly been assimilated into people that car accidents are a fact of life and the fact that generally when a plane goes down it will be 50-100times more people at once then a car accient.

Here's a chart that tells it like it is:

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

I don't get the big deal about this argument. Neither car safety nor airplane safety has ever kept me up at night, and I've never considered safety as a reason to choose one over the other. I suppose that might change after I have kids.

Even considering the chance of terrorist action against air commerce the risk of air travel remains very low.

The resources wasted by TSA could readily be directed to issues of more impact on society. It's time to regain some sanity in passenger screening.

Go and google yourself. Its all there. Wasn't even much work. I realize here in cloud cuckooland that my news isn't welcome. But the world is a tough place.

U. S. Residents lifetime odds of dying in:

• Motor Vehicle Accident 1-in-100
• Air Travel Accident 1-in-20,000

Source.

These figures are from 2001, and I assume apply only to U.S. air travel. One could probably find more recent data that include international travel, but I doubt it would change the numbers much, assuming international air travel was on major developed-world airlines.

Exactly. NBC Nightly News had a segment last week about the most dangerous roads in the U.S. Many of the issues with these roads were "structural" and, with enough money, could be fixed.

Another issue, of course, distracted drivers, texting/cell phones. However, there is a fix for that also: heavy fines and DL suspensions.

That, as well as impaired driving, could be cut into with an infusion of money to get more police on the road making arrests and writing citations.

Would cost less and save far more lives than the TSA will ever save.

And to screw up the statistics, you have bizarre sad situations like the only fatal WN accident. The one fatality was in a car, the plane ran off the end of MDW and into auto traffic.

These are average statistical odds which are meaningless. To arrive at those average statistical odds, many people will have greater odds and many will have lower odds. Some will win the reverse lottery and die in the process. Some will never suffer an accident their entire life.

Aircraft accidents are known as low probability, high consequence events. Pretty self-explanatory. Motor vehicle accidents are usually higher probability(than aircraft), low consequence events. Not always. On a foggy day, motor vehicle accidents can be high probability, high consequence events, too. Another consideration is the incidence of injury. Aircraft accidents have a higher mortality risk but motor vehicle accidents have a higher injury risk, injuries that can be as gruesome as war injuries which a person may live with the rest of their life.

Using average statistical odds of an event can create a false sense of security and misperception of the real risk. Something to think about.

never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Francine, is that you?

News is welcome. "News" is not always welcome. You frequently post "news" and pretend it is news.

Your logic is already off if you are looking at 250-300 million cars. There are about 310 million people in the US. Of those, 20% are 14 or under, so the population of drivers is somewhere below 248 million potential drivers. Now subtract the 14 & 15 year olds, those in prison, those medically unable to drive, those who live in NYC and don't have cars, the Amish, and.......

The number of cars is irrelevant. Passenger miles traveled or other statistics are much more useful.

I also don't get the tragic vs unfortunate reference. A single death is tragic if it affects you. Why is 100 people dying in a single plane crash more tragic than 2 people dying in each of 50 car crashes? Would 2 people dying with broken necks in bad turbulence on 50 flights be less tragic than a single plane hitting the side of a mountain?