Correct, but now examine the survival rate statistics for each category. A person might experience numerous car accidents in their lifetime, yet it only takes one aircraft accident to be fatal.
You think you’re being clever (Oh ho! I’ll include the two MAX 8 crashes and show him!) but surely if you actually cared about the actual safety of flying today you’d want to exclude issues with a system that’s been fixed. If we were having this discussion in 2018 or 2019 you’d have a point. We aren’t. You don’t.
Instead you’re being driven by your gut and what you want to feel is true. No, sorry, air travel is wildly safer than essentially every other form of transportation available to you by essentially every single metric. The majority of even serious aircraft accidents are survived by the majority of occupants.
Hell, a Boeing crashed at SFO a few years back. It landed short of the runway and cartwheeled. Two people died from the crash because they hadn’t been wearing seat belts. A landing Airbus in Tokyo sliced through a coast guard plane just the other month. The coast guard plane was fucked, but zero people died aboard the passenger jet. This is the norm for commercial aviation accidents.
These aren’t the incidents that come to mind for you and that’s understandable. But it is wrong.
The statistics I reference are not likelihood of accidents but likelihood of death. You are tens of thousands of times more likely to die when you get in a car versus a plane.
