As far as I know, no rocket or military fighter jet has ever been certified to carry paying passengers for exactly this reason. We're talking about shuttling people around, not highly trained test pilots.
Balloons are actually far safer than fixed wing aircraft for other reasons. It would take a complete loss of the canopy for a balloon to fall out of the sky. When they run out of fuel, they just drift slowly to the ground.
Ballistic parachutes are a last resort option, and add a large amount of weight and complexity to the aircraft. Not to mention that they do not scale up to larger passenger aircraft. It's not even comparable to the safety afforded by a stable airframe.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/24946/what-is-t...
Except a ballistic parachute does absolutely nothing for you in the scenario where > 90% of accidents happen: take off and landing. Even the most advanced BRS systems on Cirrus planes require 1000 feet AGL. There's simply no getting around the basic physics of this problem.
With a light plane, you can do a lot with a dead stick. They have remarkably generous glide slopes (nearish to a mile horizontal travel for every 1,000 vertical feet). Not to mention being inherently stable whether under power or not.
In the R22 two-seater the best glide ratio is about 4:1 ( 4ft horizontal for 1ft drop ) and those at my local airfield practice autorotation to landing all day long.
Apparently the worst helicopters for autorotation are those with Kamov's superimposed coaxial rotor system, which struggle to reach 2:1 for some aerodynamic reason I don't know.
This is a common misconception. Helicopters can glide to a landing just like airplanes.
Here's a demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTqu9iMiPIU
(Good sport, though. And I also thought a helicopter would drop like a rock without power.)
There have been rare cases where a mechanical failure seizes the main rotor, such as the crash of the WNBC news chopper (N8617B) in 1986. This particular incident was caused by poor maintenance, however.
Do people think that others are flying around everyday in machines that will likely kill them in case of a malfunction? Is the media is covering up all the helicopter related fatalities?