You are far more likely to die in a car than in a plane. It’s not even close. Over the last decade, the death rate per 100 million passenger miles in a car has been roughly 1,200 times higher than for scheduled commercial airlines. Your lifetime odds of dying in a motor vehicle crash are about 1 in 101, while so few people die in commercial airline accidents each year that the National Safety Council can’t even calculate meaningful lifetime odds.
How the Numbers Actually Compare
The simplest way to compare is by looking at how many people die per mile traveled, since that levels the playing field between a mode of transport you use daily and one you might use a few times a year. By that measure, passenger vehicles are about 1,200 times deadlier than scheduled airlines per 100 million passenger miles. Cars are also about 20 times deadlier than passenger trains and over 60 times deadlier than buses.
In raw terms, around 40,000 people die in motor vehicle crashes in the United States every year. In 2024, the entire global commercial aviation industry recorded 7 fatal accidents and 251 total fatalities, across billions of passengers. The jet hull loss rate (essentially, how often a jet is destroyed in an accident) was 0.14 per million flights worldwide.
Why Flying Feels More Dangerous Than It Is
The fear of flying is rooted in psychology, not statistics. When a plane crashes, it dominates the news cycle for days or weeks. When someone dies in a car crash, it rarely makes headlines outside local news. This creates what psychologists call an availability bias: dramatic, rare events feel more likely because they’re easier to recall. Meanwhile, car crashes kill the equivalent of a full commercial jet’s worth of people in the U.S. roughly every two days, with almost no media attention.
There’s also the issue of control. In a car, you’re the one driving, which creates an illusion of safety. In a plane, you’ve handed over control entirely to pilots you’ve never met, in a machine you don’t understand, at 35,000 feet. That loss of control triggers anxiety in a way that merging onto a highway at 70 miles per hour usually doesn’t.
Even Plane Crashes Are Surprisingly Survivable
The image most people carry of a plane crash is a fireball with no survivors. The reality is very different. NTSB data covering 2001 through 2017 shows that in about 94% of U.S. commercial airline accidents, every single person on board survived. Across all commercial accidents in that period, 98.2% of occupants walked away with minor injuries or none at all. Only 1.3% of people involved in those accidents were fatally injured.
Many aviation “accidents” in the official data involve turbulence events where a few passengers are seriously hurt but no one dies and the aircraft lands normally. The catastrophic, unsurvivable crash is the rarest scenario, not the default one.
What Makes Cars So Much Deadlier
Several factors stack up against drivers. The most obvious is exposure: most Americans spend far more time in cars than in planes, often daily, often in conditions that increase risk. Distraction, fatigue, alcohol, speeding, and poor weather all play a role, and they combine in ways that are hard to control for.
The type of vehicle you drive matters significantly. The overall driver death rate across all 2020 model-year vehicles was 38 deaths per million registered vehicle years. But that average masks huge variation. The Mitsubishi Mirage G4, a minicar, had a death rate of 205 per million registered vehicle years, more than five times the average. Larger vehicles with modern safety features tend to cluster at the low end. Where you drive matters too: rural roads have consistently higher fatality rates than urban ones, largely because of higher speeds, longer emergency response times, and two-lane roads with oncoming traffic.
Private Planes Are a Different Story
When people cite flying as safe, they’re talking about commercial airlines operating under strict federal regulations with professional two-pilot crews, rigorous maintenance schedules, and air traffic control oversight. Private and general aviation is a completely different category. Small private planes are roughly 200 times more deadly than commercial flights. Pilot error accounts for about 78% of fatal general aviation accidents in the U.S., often involving less experienced pilots, single-engine aircraft, and flights into bad weather.
So while commercial flying is extraordinarily safe, chartering a small single-engine plane for a sightseeing tour or a short hop between regional airports carries meaningfully more risk. It’s still safer than driving mile for mile, but the gap narrows considerably.
Putting the Risk in Perspective
If you drive 15,000 miles a year for 50 years, your cumulative exposure to fatal crash risk is substantial, which is how the lifetime odds land at about 1 in 101. If you fly 20 round trips a year for 50 years, your cumulative risk of dying in a commercial plane crash remains vanishingly small. You’d need to fly every day for tens of thousands of years before the odds became statistically concerning.
The most dangerous part of any flight is almost always the drive to the airport.