Also, most airline crashes occur on take-offs or landings. They almost never just fall out of the sky. So I'm not sure how they evaluate risk per time flying since the longer the flight the safer it will be per time spent. Then the flights that crash on take-off are a lot shorter than the ones that crash on landings.

Ya and it would also depend on all sorts of other things too (city you drive in, kind of car you have, airline, type of driver you are, whether or not you wear your seat belt, highway vs. local etc.), which is probably why I was never able to find any reliable data on it

According to Freakonomics walking is even deadlier than driving on a distance traveled basis.

I think cars would probably be much worse than planes per distance travelled

Sleeping is the biggest killer per distance traveled.

ps.
sleeping while fighting with a lion >> sleeping while driving a car >> sleeping while flying a plane

Unless you walk in your sleep, then the numbers improve.

Ok. Page 3 makes me very happy this thread was bumped. Excellent work by all.

I found this thread on Google and felt compelled to reply, only because the information and statistics in here are so horribly wrong.

According to Dr. Arnold Barnett, MIT professor of statistics and aviation expert, the chance of dying in any one plane journey is about 1 in 7-million.

I don't know how he figured that out, but you have to look at the statistics on planecrashinfo.com or airsafe.com to see that the numbers given in the original thread are wrong by a factor of 10 or 20, depending on who you fly with.

Judging by the stats on those websites, the frequency of fatal accidents for a reputable airline (pretty much anyone in the Western World) is about 1 in 5-million flights. That's roughly similar to the number Dr. Barnett came up with. I guess he's factoring in that modern flights are safer than flights in the 70s and 80s that a lot of the figures come from.

So if you read the original thread and it worried you, forget about. The stats in the OP are completely wrong. Check for yourself at airsafe.com or planecrashinfo.com.

Here's another problem with the analysis. There are low probability/high impact possible events that may not be in the historical data.

For example, what is the chance that the entire air traffic control system goes out at once? That could result in thousands of crashes. If the chance is 1 in 10 million on any day, you wouldn't expect to have any observations. Yet it could add significantly to the expected number of crashes.

Other things that could cause many crashes are a volcanic eruption 100 times the size of the recent Icelandic ones, a coordinated terrorist action, a Y2K-type bug in autopilot software that triggers suddenly or an electromagnetic pulse. And you know there are lots of things no one has thought of.

However, there are also lots of low-probability / high-impact things that can kill you when you're not in an airplane, so perhaps it makes no relative difference.

The probability of dying in a plane crash is much higher than most people think

Tell us more.

No.

A flying plane can be hacked from the ground using cheap radio equipment, especially older planes which weren't coded with cybersecurity in mind. I skimmed that from Slashdot a month or two ago. IIRC the article gave the impression that the hacks don't require much skill.

Maybe ALHOFMANN has plans to bring a plane down in that manner, hence his secretiveness...

I've came across this while trying to find out the real odds of dying in a plane crash. I kind of felt that the probability we are being told, ''1 in 11 million'' or the comparisons vs cars etc. are wrong. People just hear that somewhere and repeat it. So I said that the probability of dying in a plane crash (which is still very low) is much higher than most people think.

You "kind of felt"? What do you "feel" the odds are?

No airline crashes anywhere in the world last year!