delichon
9 hours ago
> How is it that commercial aviation, surely a much more technically challenging endeavor than ground transport, is relatively safe, while commercial trucking is responsible for more than five thousand deaths per year? The simple reason is that commercial aviation is highly regulated, and the overseeing government administration is relatively well-funded.
The roads on the ground are vastly more complex than the highways in the sky, and the density of human pilots a few feet away is vastly higher. At the same time ground transport is handling ~600x more tonnage and ~6x more drivers per ton. To say the death difference is simply regulation ignores a lot.