Is this (fatal/survive) a typo, or does it mean you could survive where some passengers don't?
Flying is still pretty safe, but we shouldn't understate the impact weighted risk of activities.
Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow is a great book on the topic of how to put together complex systems that are forgiving of user error: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents
Here's a summary: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kell0956/docs/systemic_failures_1.pdf
The book uses airline safety as one of its primary examples. Here's an article applying it to a previous aircraft disaster: http://boingboing.net/2011/12/08/disaster-book-club-what-you...
For instance hospitals (and some industries) measure sentinel events [1][2]. Sentinel events cause death or serious permanent injury, or events that could cause death or serious permanent injury.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_event
2: I couldn't find a reference for industry, but I know they are recorded because I went through the training.
I think it's a large part of why the US airline industry has become so much safer over time. Having a lower-bound number for altitude overshoots or communication problems is immensely useful for policy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_Syste...
Programs like this are why much of the worlds airlines are safer. It's not a US only thing.
This sounds like focusing only on benefits and ignoring costs. That rarely leads to good overall outcomes.
This is a very useful mental error to be able to spot. A very common argument is "X has a clear benefit, so we should do it!". The benefit is absolutely real, but you also need to look at the costs to make a good decision.
Another failure mode is risk aversion. If the FDA approves something that turns out to kill 1000 people, they get in much worse media and political trouble than if they don't approve something that would have saved 1,000,000 lives. So they focus hard on costs and less on benefits.
One way to think about it is that those resources could save 100 times more lives per dollar in other areas.
A similar line of reasoning would be “In this developed country that I live in, no one dies from being poisoned by tap water. I oppose this massive overspend on making tap water potable! The resources used to reach this absolute would certainly save more lives per dollar elsewhere”.
How much would we save my making tap water less potable? What would be the consequences if we did?
Sometimes, absolute safety or near-absolute-safety is within reach and is the sweet spot for smart engineering.
There is precisely no objective reason to believe that at face value.
Just 2010 had 267 fatal accidents and 453 deaths, though the trend looks good. http://www.aopa.org/About-AOPA/General-Aviation-Statistics/G...
If you want to get technical about it nearly all plane fatalities are caused by a lack of altitude, but that's a different story.
http://www.asias.faa.gov/pls/apex/f?p=100:43:0::NO::P43_REGI...
It's an incredible human achievement.
I make a hobby of reading through NTSB avaition an maritime accident reports. It's a fascinating look at how to create almost failure free systems out of mechanical things that break and humans that do stupid things.