You allways hear "air travel is  statisticaly safer than car travel"

Can somebody fine any evidance to support this ? 

I would like to see some statistical data, with exactly how they work
it out mathematicaly.......if possible.

if somebody does find some info, can we get a date on it too, like was
the calculation before or after sept 11

bluekat,

The Boeing website has a page dedicated to promoting airline safety:
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/safety/pf/pf_howsafe.html

Although one would assume that Boeing has a vested interest in showing
the safety of air travel.  However, they cite a study from 1993-1995
by the U.S. National Safety Council that shows that flying in a
commercial jet is approximately 22 times safer than car travel.

Although the National Safety Council website does not have the actual
report on line, they do confirm the relative safety of air travel on
their "What are the odds of dying?  Statistics 2000" site
http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm  Here is a small selection
from that list:

Type of Accident or Manner of Injury  Deaths     One Year Odds  Lifetime Odds
------------------------------------  ------  ----------------  --------------
Car occupant                          14,813       1 in 18,585        1 in 242
Pedestrian                             5,870       1 in 46,901        1 in 610
Motorcycle rider                       2,765       1 in 99,568      1 in 1,295
Air and space transport accidents        777      1 in 354,319      1 in 4,608
Bus occupant                              20   1 in 13,765,300    1 in 179,003
Occupant of streetcar                      1  1 in 275,306,000  1 in 3,580,052
 
It's interesting to note that while air travel results in far less
fatalities than car travel, ground based mass transit is far safer
still than air travel in the United States.  So while the air travel
industry can legitimately claim to cause far less deaths than personal
car travel (or even good old walking), it is still no match for the
slow but dependable bus in terms of safety.

On a personal note, after seeing this report, I have decided to limit
my travel to streetcars whenever possible.

Sources cited:
--------------
Boeing
http://www.boeing.com/

National Safety Council
http://www.nsc.org/

Search terms used:
------------------
air travel car safer study
"U.S. National Safety Council"

thankyou

I visited the nsc website referenced above and have to say the results
are fairly misleading and don't really relate to the question.  Since
the results simply take the number of deaths by a cause and divide by
the population, there is no weighting of the amount of man-hours
participating in the activity mentioned.  As an example, I would point
out that one would not actually have any likelihood of dying on a
streetcar unless one actually rode a streetcar.  More relevantly, the
number of deaths in an activity needs to be divided by the number of
man-hours spent by people involved in the activity to more accurately
assess the risk.

So, unless one were to compare the number of deaths/total man-hours
spent  driving + being a passenger in a car to the number of
deaths/total man-hours spent flying + being a passenger in a plane, an
accurate comparison cannot be made.

Hope that helps.

Oh, not to beat a dead horse (so to speak), but I did want to point
out that there is nothing terribly wrong with how the information is
presented on the website.  It merely says it is a presentation of the
odds of dying in one of those activities.  The error is that this has
nothing to do with how dangerous those activities are.

What a great question; what a great answer; and what great comments
(until mine ... a touch of false modesty).

It demonstrates how organisations use statistics for their own advantage.

No surprise there.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." - Mark Twain

More accurately, from Mark Twain's autobiography, as originally stated
by Leonard Courtney.

http://www.boondocksnet.com/twaintexts/quotes_not_twain.html

thankyou all for your coments , from the infomation presented by the
reseacher and also from the coments from Leoj-ga   I have the opinion
that air travel is alot more dangerous than advertised, which goes
along with what i have thought for a long time.

I mean to compare airplane and car in a fair way, one would have to
have the same people useing a car every day , flying in a plane
everyday, or to be more accrute they should be passengers in a car
every day compared with being a pasenger on a airplane everyday.

ok i know this does not happen in the real world but this would be a
fair comparison.........it really just shows how dangerous air travel
is now, since sept 11, how many planes have crashed , shoot down or
hijacked, then we had sars, and of course if u visited certain
airports , like heathro in england the chances would increase even
more..............i remember last year when the army had over 400
soilders at the airport

anyway I sonmewhat feel that it is not possible to calculate it or
even compare it to car travel.

I'd be interested to know how many people get killed driving to/from
the airport (or killed by someone driving to/from an airport) versus
how many are killed by the air travel itsself. I've always figured
once I got to the terminal, the dangerous part was over.

I think the appropriate statistic to use to compare safety of air vs
car travel is deaths per passenger mile (rather than total deaths or
deaths per passenger hour).  Using this statistic, you can tell
whether the probability of death while getting from point A to point B
is higher in a car or a plane.

Check out: 

http://plus.maths.org/issue15/editorial/

This site claims that flying is about 100 times safer than driving,
which in turn is about 50 times safer than riding a motorcycle.

I came back to modify my comment, but found that racecar-ga had done
essentially the same thing.  If properly done, deaths per passenger
mile would seem to be a more useful metric, since the overall safety
could be assessed by comparing the total passenger miles traveled in
the different modes in a given year.

And honestly, I believe flying is much, much more safe that car
travel.  Mainly because there are no SUVs in the air.