I know you werent referring to bungee jumping, but it was an excellent
example.
My point is exactly that it's impossible to make an apples-to-apples risk
comparison of two activities, as you say. Yet somehow GA is labelled as
being very dangerous as compared with other activities. And since there is
not an apples-to-apples comparison as evidence, it must be based on
people's fear of heights, speed, and lack of control more than any
statistic.
Ron Garret wrote in
:
In article ,
Judah wrote:
Ron Garret wrote in
:
In article ,
Judah wrote:
According to
http://www.deathreference.com/Ho-Ka/...Mortality.html
approximately 50,000 Americans per year die in occupational
injuries. So in other words, working is more dangerous than flying.
No, because most people work a lot more than they fly.
Take it to the extreme: more people die every year riding in GA
planes than they do, say, jumping off bridges. That doesn't mean
that jumping off a bridge is safer than flying.
I'm not trying to say it is. All I'm trying to say is that there are
plenty of things in life that are substantially more dangerous than
flying. Yet somehow, an extraordinary number of people have an innate
fear of flying, and it leads to things like insurance companies asking
about it on their policies.
I didn't see statistics for bungee jumping off bridges. But my guess is
that flying is indeed safer than bungee jumping, especially off
bridges. Yet I don't recall being asked on my insurance forms if I have
bungee jumped within the last 12 months... It's just not an issue.
I wasn't referring to bungee jumping. When I said "jumping off a
bridge" I meant it literally.
The reason a lot more people die on the roads than in the air is not
that driving is more dangerous than flying, it's that more people drive
than fly. Likewise, the reason more people die flying than (let's use a
different example) playing Russian Roulette is not that flying is more
dangerous than RR.
It's very hard to do an apples-to-apples risk comparison among two
different activities. What do you comapre? Deaths per year? Per
vehicle hour? Per passenger mile? Do you count the "avoidable" deaths
where someone just did something stupid (like take off without enough
fuel or jump off a bridge)?
rg