Mxsmanic wrote in
:

How many people have sex each year? How many ride or drive in cars?
How many take illicit drugs? And how many ride or fly planes?

How many accidents per sex hour are there? How about per illicit drug use
hour? If you're going to try to compare apples to apples, please do it
properly.

Commercial aviation is quite safe. General aviation, however, is
significantly less so. The great majority of aviation accidents
involve general aviation. The accident rate per flight hour is nearly
40 times higher for general aviation than for commercial airlines; the
number of fatalities per flight hour is almost 82 times higher. There
are more general aviation accidents per week in the U.S. than there
are per year for commercial airlines, and they both have comparable
numbers of flight hours (24 million for GA vs. 19 million for
airlines).

These numbers are relative to each other. This does nothing to speak to the
number of aviation accidents (GA or commercial) per flight hour or per
mile. It is a load of crap.

This doesn't necessarily mean that general aviation is intrinsically
less safe. It says more about a lack of discipline in general
aviation: careless pilots, careless maintenance, etc. It is also true
that reciprocating engines are much less reliable than turbine
engines, which contributes to the statistics.

1) In a GA accident, there is usually between 1 and 4 fatalities. Ina
commercial aviation accident, there are usually between 30 and 300
fatalities. The statistics are irrelevant because it takes just one
commercial aviation accident to match up with 100 GA ones.

2) I'm not trying to compare general aviation safety to commercial aviation
safety. I'm trying to find out why people are so scared of flying when all
of 800 people die a year doing it.

I think people's fear of GA is not based on fact, but it's based on a
combination of Acrophobia (fear of heights) and Tachophobia (fear of
speed). And we just sit here and take it.

Unfortunately, their fear of GA (in comparison to commercial air
travel) is quite justified, as the numbers above make clear.

Bullcrapola. Many people are just as afraid of flying commercially as they
are of flying GA. In fact, I know several people who are afraid of flying
commercially but are NOT afraid of flying GA. And one of them is a former
mechanic for an airline.

You can avoid becoming one of the statistics by being a disciplined
and safe pilot and taking no chances, and by flying only aircraft that
are properly maintained, in the conditions for which they were
designed. But you can be sure that other, careless pilots and poorly
maintained aircraft will continue to keep the accident rates high.

This may be true, but it's non-sequiter to my question. BTW: The statistic
of 800 people per year seems to include both commercial and GA.