planes vs cycles

Cub Driver wrote:

General Aviation 0.036 / million passenger-miles
Motorcycles 0.309 / million passenger-miles

Making GA about 9 times safer than motorcycles to get from one place to
another.

Another shibboleth ruined!

What do the same statistics say about GA and automobiles?

Automobiles 0.021 / million passenger-miles

Making the fatality rate 70% higher per passenger-mile for GA.

Of course, as posted earlier, it really should be *driver*-miles, not
passenger-miles, since automobiles likely carry more people on average
than GA aircraft.

That is why I also quoted the numbers for vehicle-miles in my earlier
post -- One vehicle, one driver.

Beyond that, the average occupancy of automobiles is typically quoted as
about 1.6 people per vehicle. In General Aviation, as defined by the
FAA, occupancy is a bit over 3 per aircraft.

And where does GA stop? Does it include biz jets?

Yes, which are considered quite safe.

I think what most of us would like to know is the hazard of
*lightplanes" perhaps defined as single-engine recips.

Single engine piston aircraft contribute 60% of all aircraft hours.
Turbojets contribute about 10%, with rotorcraft (7$), turboprops (7%),
and experimentals (5%) contributing most of the rest.

Single engine recips would likely contribute less than 60% of the
passenger-miles, considering the higher speed and greater capacity of
most turboprops and turbojets. Recips probably are involved in more
than their share of all fatal accidents. That suggests that a safety
comparison of small piston aircraft to automobiles on a passenger-mile
basis would be worse than shown above for all GA activity.