"Captain Wubba" wrote in message
om...

It made the most sense to me, when comparing 'travel by car'
to 'travel by GA plane' to use the figures for *all* cars vs. *all* GA
planes.

Except that it doesn't, really. A 500-hour pilot flying an Arrow and two
ATPs cuing the FMS on a Gulfstream V are about as different as a wheelbarrow
and a submarine. Even owner-flown jets and turboprops rarely match the
safety record of profesionally-crewed flights in the same equipment. The
data are unambiguous on this point.

It depends on which definition you want to use. What is 'safe'? Just
for giggles, I asked that question ("Which of these two definitions
would you personally use in determeing if something was safe or not?")
to 8 non-aviator co-workers today. 6 of them said 'Injured or killed'
(which favors GA) and 2 of them said 'killed' (which favors cars).

As any exit pollster will tell you, how people answer the question is
largely determined by how you ask it.

Try asking the question this way: "Activity A is three times more likely to
cause you an injury than Activity B. Activity B is four and a half times
more likely to kill you than Activity A. Which sounds like the safer
activity?"

Another problem is that you're not weighting for the severity of injury.
Breaking an arm and being paralyzed from the neck down are thus being
counted the same. Without knowing this breakdown we can only guess at what's
going on.

The numbers don't lie tho...to say that aviation is 'less safe' than
car travel, one has to use a particular definition of 'safe'. You may
feel it is the 'better' definition. I don't.

By your own tortured numbers you are 4.5 times as likely to die in a plane
crash as a car crash. QED.

-cwk.