Great, another horror story to add to my "this is why I abhor air travel" bank. I know the statistics show that planes are very safe, but it's hard to reconcile the numbers with grisly accounts like these.
I think the statistic that was interesting to the GGP was absolute likelihood of death, not likelihood that you will contribute to your death by incompetence. In that case, it's irrelevant whether you're the pilot/driver.
I don't want to get into a thing here, but many times I've been on the road and avoided accidents, sometimes serious ones, by driving intelligently. Almost all of the wrecks or near-really-bad-wrecks I see occur when both parties are not paying enough attention or don't know how to respond to the crisis.
Surely you can find grisly accounts relating to any mode of transportation you care to name. There's nothing uniquely grisly about air travel accidents.
In motor vehicle accidents, you don't have time to think about what is going to happen. As a plane is in a freefall, there's at least a good 30 seconds before ground collision. Having that time to think about how your life is about to end seems grisly to me.
You might struggle for days or weeks before succumbing to your injuries after a car accident. Again, there's nothing particularly bad about airplane accidents, except for the part where they're much more rare and thus much more newsworthy.
Take-off and landing, which account for only 2% of flight time, are responsible for about 40% of fatal crashes. If we include taxiing, final approach, and and initial climb this is 70% of fatal crashes for 6% of flight time [1].
