magiciansampras

Um, no.

ralfp

The no is correct (there are far fewer than 4 million flights per day). (Reference). Including cargo, GA, military, etc. flights, there were 77 million flights in 2008. That's about 200,000 per day. Excluding non-commercial (or even all non-passenger) flights would bring this number down by less than a factor of 0.5.

Still, pinworm's points seem valid.

gglave

Yes it is, because the counter 'resets' each time you pull the lever on the slot machine...

ralfp

If one were to spend one's entire life on commercial flights, the chance that one would die from flying is about 2%. Given that even the most frequent fliers (e.g. professional pilots) spend the vast majority of their time on the ground, the real risk is pretty trivial.

If one spent one's entire life flying on commercial airplanes, one would travel about 0.4 billion kilometers. Traveling the same distance by car would likely kill one more than once over, but would take about 6 lifetimes to accomplish at 100kph.

I used these statistics, a 78-year life expectancy, and an average air travel speed of about 600 km per hour. Yes, my math is handwavy.

Camflyer

If you spent your entire life on commercial flights you are more likely to die from radiation poisoning, oxygen deficiency or malnourishment than crashing!

ttjoseph

FlyerTalk represents a large community of frequent flyers. How many of us have been killed in a plane crash?

will5404

Least if I die traveling, I'll be doing what I love.

Can you post to FT from beyond the grave?

zlc

Statistics and probability is something easy to understand, and extremely difficult to comprehend beyond the basic level for most people. Anything can be manipulated and/or presented in such a way to skew the odds dramatically, or effectively having people comparing apples and oranges without knowing it.

Someone has said the average odds of crash on a particular flight is a few millions : 1, which I would say about the same as winning a lotto jackpot on a single ticket.

The questions then is, if you buy a lotto ticket every week, do you realistically believe you will win a jackpot over your lifetime?

Cha-cha-cha

I recently read in a reliable source that if you drive the average amount of miles per year in the USA for 50 years, your chances of dying in an auto accident are about 1 in 100.

pinniped

I read somewhere that more people are killed by donkeys every year than in airline crashes.


Therefore, I fly often and avoid donkeys whenever possible, conniving bloodthirsty beasts that they are...

ralfp

I was trying to avoid those issues...

That's almost, but not quite, the same as saying that 1 out of every 5000 (0.02%) Americans dies in a car crash every year.

That being said, the chance of death for an average person is pretty meaningless for an activity where the death rate is proportional to how often one engages in that activity. What's relevant is the risk versus one's other options (e.g. fly or drive). In that regard flying commercially is FAR less risky than any other mode of transport (for reasonable length trips).

Of course the risks are generally low enough that other considerations, especially time & money, take precedence. Is a perfectly safe method of travel preferable if it takes 10 days vs. 10 hours of flying? No, because that's like cutting 10 days away from your life.

Polar Man

"On a long enough time line everyone’s life expectancy drops to zero"
Fight Club

Wally Bird

Taking the question literally the answer is 47%.

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

mecabq

I agree, I never understood that rule that X executives couldn't be on the same flight, but they never had a rule that X executives couldn't be on the same bus or same car, where of course they have a far higher probability of being killed.

I think that this is a good example of mathematical ignorance in our society.

Of course, but I mean that if one hypothetically chooses a job that will take him on 1,000 flights over his life compared to a job that will take him on 0 flights, that does increase the risk of accidental death by a perhaps non-trivial magnitude, all else equal. Just like if someone buys a lottery ticket every week for 20 years, he has not-quite-so-long odds of winning once in his lifetime.

zlc

It's still a long odds, if you are talking about the jackpot. Considering the average odds of a lottery being 1:10,000,000, the probability of winning at least once during a 20 year period (1000 tickets) is about 1:10,000, which means the probability of NOT winning is 99.99%.

See the funny thing about number is how you presented it, a lot of people will think that an 1:10,000 odds is somewhat achievable while a 99.99% failure rate is considered to be almost impossible.