Because of the wider availability of online tools that help the flying public buy cheap tickets, air travel remains popular, despite economic conditions. When determining whether driving or flying is safer, it’s important to define terms carefully. Every year in the United States, there are about 40,000 deaths from automobile accidents and about 200 deaths from air transport crashes.
Looking at fatalities only, every year in the U.S. about one in 6,800 drivers is killed in a car accident. For airline passengers, the number is one in 1.6 million. More people die in car crashes each year, even though the survival rate for plane crashes is lower than for car crashes. In other words, while people walk away from “fender benders” every day, there’s rarely such a thing as a commercial airline “fender bender.”
One reason people feel safer in cars despite the statistics is that drivers feel they have more control over their destiny, unlike on a plane, where they must trust the flight crew to get them to their destination safely.
Drivers can avoid driving drunk, keep speed under control, drive defensively, and watch following distance. But in reality, drivers cannot account for factors like other drunk drivers on the road, so their control on any given trip is less than they may think. To equal the number of car accident deaths, you would need more than 20 serious large jet accidents (with 300 or so deaths) in a year.
People who fear flying may have related fears like claustrophobia or acrophobia (fear of heights), or they may be distressed by the lack of control over their mode of travel. Yet even when such terrifying prospects as hijackers or incompetent pilots are taken into account, the statistics show that commercial aviation is a safer mode of transport when compared to driving.