Comment by dmd
13 hours ago
Given an hour spent flying in a commercial US-flagged airliner or an hour spent in your living room, and you're (far) more likely to get hurt or die in your living room.
13 hours ago
Given an hour spent flying in a commercial US-flagged airliner or an hour spent in your living room, and you're (far) more likely to get hurt or die in your living room.
There's probably a selection bias here; if you're sick, you are far more likely to be inside your living room than on an airplane.
My guess would be that a lot of living room deaths are due to illness which would make the person unlikely to board a commercial flight, or other categories which certain individuals could reasonably exclude themselves from (drug overdose, suicide, amateur electrician work, etc.).
I doubt there's a good source of data, but I'd be very curious what the odds of dying in your living room per hour are if you exclude those categories and look at things like house fires, natural disasters, homicide, freak accidents (like planes falling on your house), etc.
Is that actual statistic?
Actual statistics: In 2023 there were 35.3 million commercial flights worldwide.[1] In that year, there were 66 accidents in commercial aviation worldwide, of which one fatal (9N-ANC).[2] This means that the chance of being in an accident was approx 1:535,000 (0.000187 %). The chance of getting into a fatal accident was 1:35,300,000 (0.000003 %). Per passenger the chance of fatality was approx 1:61,111,111 (0.00000164 %), with 72 fatalities among 4,400,000,000 total passengers.
In contrast, the United States saw 125,700 preventable deaths in the home in 2023.[3] The country had a population of 336,806,231 people back then.[4] This means a probability of approx 1:2,679 (0.037 %).
[1] ATAG Aviation Beyond Borders 2024
[2] ICAO Safety Report 2024 Edition
[3] National Safety Council (NSC) Injury Facts
[4] World Bank
Airliners are hilariously safe. One of my favorite stats is that it’s the second safest form of transportation per passenger mile (elevators win).
Per passenger mile is arguably not the best denominator. People choose planes because they are going long distances. Consider whether a better denominator would be per passenger trips. A 10,000 mi trip halfway across the world could have the same weight as a 2 mi trip to the grocery store. Or per hour travelled.
By these metrics commercial flying isn't as safe as you think.
5 replies →
Living rooms are also hilariously safe. And we spend a lot of time in them.
Is there actual reason to think they are less safe per hour of time being spend in them as OP claimed?
1 reply →
How about per fly versus per drive? This weeds out two issues:
- Most people don't fly often enough to justify Statistics significance (I for one only flied maybe less than 10 flights in my whole life)
- One flight is going to cover a huge amount of mileage anyway
Edit: Just realized that issue 1 is not an issue, we are going to do an average here anyway, so not individual.
rogerrogerr, I suspect that stat involves all deaths, not just to passengers.
The vast majority of deaths by train involve "trespassers", which is code for "dimwits who bypassed crossing gates and got smashed by the train that couldn't stop". Usually not even the train drivers are injured, much less the passengers.
But airplanes are very safe - perhaps mostly because it's hard for idiots to drive in front of them.
> which is code for "dimwits who bypassed crossing gates and got smashed by the train that couldn't stop".
It's code for suicide. The remainder are as you described.
Yeah, but so are living rooms. And even when someone dies in the living room, it is most likely to be a hearth attack or other heath issue unrelated to the place.
Two nits:
First, you are correct about trespassers. But even if you only consider passengers, planes are still safer per passenger-mile than trains.
Second, commercial planes are very safe. Private planes... not in the same league.
[citation needed]
All things being equal, I would assume that you are safer in an environment that's stationary and reasonably sturdy, rather than in an aluminum tube at 40,000 ft above ground? Ok, as they say, all things are rarely equal, of course people are more likely to die of old age or of various diseases at home rather than while traveling (simply because old and terminally ill people probably don't travel that much), but I would say that skews the statistics against the living room and should be discounted. And at home you can engage in various activities that you probably won't do while on an airplane (electrical repairs, cooking...), but if you get hurt while doing that, that's also not a fault of the living room per se...
That's just it though. You're safer strapped into a seat, doing nothing, than you are doing whatever it is you do at home.
Would you be safer in your living room doing nothing, strapped to a seat, never doing anything remotely hazardous (like walking around), vs the same in a tube in the sky? Yes, of course. But that's not what people actually DO in their living rooms!
Higher risk of developing blood clots while sitting immobilized at altitude in an airplane seat.
Contributing factors:
- Prolonged immobility, which causes blood to pool in the legs
- Low cabin pressure and dehydration from the dry cabin air
Something...something...and statistics.