"Larry Fransson" wrote in message
...
You don't generally hear about percentages - just raw numbers. In terms
of raw numbers, more people are killed on the highways every year than
on aircraft.

So what? Most people have no idea what the raw numbers are. In fact, most
people have no idea what ANY of the numbers are. All they really know is
that their TV tells them that airplanes are more dangerous. It's
practically coincidence that, by most measures, the TV is correct, since
other than that basic generalization, the TV doesn't really understand
aviation.

The OP stated that if flying killed fewer people, then
more people would fly. My point was that by that reasoning, there
should be very few people driving cars given the large number of crashes
and automobile-related deaths every year.

Your reasoning is flawed. The original post may well have been incorrect,
but there's no way to show that by drawing an analogy to driving. Aviation
and driving are two very different activities, and it's foolish to think
that if you could make one single variable (out of countless) the same in
each, that the resulting behaviors would be identical. But regardless, even
assuming a rational comparison of fatality rates, driving comes out way
ahead of flying. People don't care how many times X happens total, they
care what their chances of X happening to them is (assuming they stop to
think about it at all, which they normally don't).

Pete