If cars had the same death rate per mile as airplanes, tens of thousands of lives would be saved every year in the US alone.

To first order, planes only crash when they're landing or taking off.

Cars crash in pretty much every situation. Fatal incidents are more clumped but no where near as much as planes.

I vaguely recall that the risks are closer than you'd expect when going by hours of flight, rather than distance. I'm not finding the numbers right now though.

In https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risky.html I did find some older numbers. For commercial carries, it was 1.9 deaths per vehicle mile instead of 1.3.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risk-01.html (99 through 03)

However, private planes are more risky and don't seem to be included in those numbers.

Pithey comment that is true based on current usage patterns, but a total lie when everyone starts flying to work or the grocery store... and they're the pilot.

Agreed, the human pilot is the problem. The sooner we can remove them from the situation, the more lives will be saved

If drivers got the same training and stuck to the same rules as airline pilots, we'd have a lot less accidents. Most accidents [citation needed] are still caused by reckless driving; inattentiveness (exacerbated by driving assistance), speeding, drunk driving, aggressive driving, etc.

Moving to automatic driving will probably be a thing long term, but for the short term, it's a human problem. If only people were held more accountable for driving badly.

Don't worry, that will be enabled at a later date. Mid-Atlantic.

Even the 737 MAX was very safe though. That's why it was notable: it was a genuine safety regression with a clear root cause in an industry that had been getting steadily and inexorably safer for decades and decades.

Sure. It's a plane that never crashed in the entire Western Hemisphere and Europe. Among "unsafe" things that's pretty good.