Every time I board a plane, I think what a crazy thing I am doing, but then I remember that I could be safe and snug in my house and still be in a plane crash.
To be fair, statistically, your living room is far more dangerous than the cabin of an airplane.
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.
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...
Background risk of death from non-natural causes are listed as 1.6 per day; many of those non-natural causes do not exist in an airplane cabin (e.g. you probably aren't going to be murdered because no one has anything more effective than a plastic spork, you probably aren't going to kill yourself, you probably won't be hit by a car). So it seems reasonable to say that being inside an airliner cabin is safer than being outside of one.
Also, this is probably confounded by many super-old or super-sick people not choosing to fly - if you are in an airliner, you are probably healthier than the average person.
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!
Contributing factors:
- Prolonged immobility, which causes blood to pool in the legs
- Low cabin pressure and dehydration from the dry cabin air
According to Garp, you just need to buy a pre-disastered home. You'll be safe there.[^1]
(Unfortunately his logic is flawed.[^2])
[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3TuoGVNbBs
[^2]: https://xkcd.com/795/
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.
Except for the occasional murder who has access to the flight controls.
- 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.
Is there actual reason to think they are less safe per hour of time being spend in them as OP claimed?
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.
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
By these metrics commercial flying isn't as safe as you think.
It's code for suicide. The remainder are as you described.
Furthest you can go in a straight land on land is about 7000 miles :).
If someone said an event happens “occasionally”, I would expect it to be significantly more frequent than 1/300,000,000.
Powerball lottery odds are 1 in 292 million. I wouldn’t say that I “occasionally” win the lottery when I buy a ticket!