It's hard to find a good statistic that would make modes of transport comparable. But if I'd pick one I'd pick time spent (are 10 hours on a plane more or less safe than 10 hours in a car)

edit: nvm I found it on wikipedia, for United Kingdom 1990–2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comp...

air/car deaths/h = 4.2x so... on this metric, not like "1000x safer"

That number confused me (I expected to be zero point something).

For the reference, the actual numbers in Wikipedia are: deaths per billion hours traveled: air = 30.8 ; car = 130

30.8 / 130 ~ 0.24

Take that 4.2/20 and you have 0.21. Or flip it around the 737 Max is 5 times more dangerous than a passenger car. That's drunk driver territory.

it’s rarely the CAR that kills you. It’s other drivers or your own negligence.

In the 737max case it’s Boeing that killed you.

Airplanes are faster than cars, and the average trip is longer. So, even if the pax fatality rate per distance is much better for aircraft (a factor of 200 to 1000, say), the fatality rate per trip is not that much better (a factor of 2 to 10, say).

Some more notes:

- That is for part 121 aviation (airlines). General aviation fatality rates are much worse (you're 15 times more likely to die in a small plane than in a car for the same distance, and 250 times more per trip...)

- An airliner also carries many more pax. The above numbers are per pax; if you base it per vehicle, then a plane is only about 5 times safer than a car for a given distance, and about 20 times more likely to crash than a car per trip.

- About 4% or so of all B747 or A300 ever built have been complete hull losses. (Newer planes are safer, presumably, but also haven't been around that long, so the statistics are not entirely trivial to compare.)

I'd be more interested in knowing where FATAL accidents occur, on the suspicion that most people do not live on highways and local streets are traveled at lower speeds.