r/news • u/Canadian-Man-infj • 1d ago

U.S. Coast Guard searching for missing Hamilton-based air ambulance with 6 passengers

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/hamilton-air-ambulance-missing-us-coast-guard-search-9.7368182
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u/Deranged40 1d ago edited 1d ago

aviation is by far the safest form of transportation on a per mile basis.

Remember, this statistic is only true of US Commercial aviation. At any given time in the US, about 15-20% of the non-military craft that are airborne are commercial aircraft. The vast majority of airborne aircraft at any given time are general aviation craft. For every commercial airport in the US (about 5,000) there's 3 private airports (almost 15,000). (source: faa.gov)

The popular statistic you're mentioning is not true of general aviation. General aviation has hundreds of crashes with fatalities every single year and is statistically not as safe as driving an automobile. There are no years on record where no general aviation fatalities were recorded. 2024 recorded the fewest fatalities in the past 30 years, with just about 300 people dying in a plane crash.

And a side note: this aircraft was Canadian and crewed by Canadians, and I can't find any evidence that it had entered US air space on this particular trip, even though its destination was Boston

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u/TminusTech 1d ago

At any given time in the US, about 15-20% of the non-military craft that are airborne are commercial aircraft.

Uhhhh please provide a source.

For every commercial airport in the US (about 5,000) there's 3 private airports (almost 15,000).

You misread the FAA page, The FAA says there are about 5k public use facilities and 14.4k private use facilities. Public use does not mean commercial airport. There are about 500 commercial service airports in the US. Most of the 5k public are general aviation, so around 90 percent of airports in the FAA national airport system are general aviation airports.

I think the underlying issue is that people often conflate general aviation with commercial aviation when interpreting accident reporting.

General aviation has become progressively safer over time, but it is still substantially more dangerous than scheduled commercial flying. Because general aviation accidents make up a large share of aviation accident headlines, they can also distort the public perception of aviation safety as a whole.

The difficult part is that there is no especially good metric for the number of unique people who participate in general aviation each year. General aviation accounts for most individual civilian aircraft in the United States, but that does not mean most people who fly are using general aviation. Commercial aviation serves a vastly larger population: roughly 135 million U.S. adults take at least one commercial flight in a typical recent year.

At the same time, general aviation exposure is much more concentrated. Pilots, flight students, instructors, aircraft owners, and other regular participants are likely to fly far more frequently than the typical commercial passenger. So simply comparing the number of aircraft, accidents, or fatalities without accounting for the number of people involved and how much they actually fly can give a misleading picture. They are different categories of activity with very different risk profiles and very different populations using them.

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u/Deranged40 1d ago

Uhhhh please provide a source.

I literally did. From the FAA. Please, at least click the source provided before commenting further. This is as far in your comment as I read.

If you would like to provide information saying otherwise, feel free to.

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u/TminusTech 1d ago

I did click it. The FAA page you linked does not appear to support the claim that only 15ā€“20% of non-military aircraft airborne at any given time are commercial aircraft.

It does contain the airport/facility numbers you cited, but those were also mischaracterized: the roughly 5,000 figure is public-use airports/facilities, not commercial airports. The number of commercial-service airports is closer to 500.

So if the 15ā€“20% figure is somewhere on that FAA page, point me to the specific table or section, because Iā€™m not seeing it. Otherwise, the link is not actually a source for that claim.